It shouldn’t come as a surprise that health and geography are intrinsically linked. The places we spend time in influence our access and exposure to determinants of health – pollutants, disease, food and nutrients, health services, and more.
The lecture included examples such as the relationships between climate, elevation & distribution of malaria, as well as the connections between exposure to fast food restaurants and childhood obesity rates. These were definitely useful to generate potential topics for the class project.. (perhaps the geographical distribution of radon and incidences of respiratory cancer?)
We compared definitions and perspectives of medical and health geography, epidemiology and environmental justice. Health geography combines qualitative and quantitative methods, and considers the special role of “place” in determining health. A geographical perspective is useful because we, as geographers, tend to focus on the relationship between people, place, and “space.” In this vein, geographers emphasize the importance of considering local contexts (including societal factors). A regional/national/international scale of study can be useful, but it is not sufficient. This unique contribution to health geography research can be observed in methodological developments including multi-level statistical models, cluster analysis and geographically weighted regression.