Rather than summarizing my in-class learning from this week’s lecture, I will be sharing a summary from reading over the lecture notes as I was sick at home with the flu:
The lecture covered how GIS can serve as a useful tool for health geographers and researchers. The major applications for GIS in health geography are: (1) spatial epidemiology; (2) environmental hazards; (3) modeling health services; and (4) identifying health inequalities. Spatial epidemiology is concerned with describing and understanding spatial variation in disease risk. The framework for the analysis is based on the uneven distribution of population, people’s mobility, individual characteristics (e.g., sex, age, lifestyle, etc.), and the tendency for people to live in communities, cities, or in clusters. Environmental hazards is a multilevel process: hazard surveillance (i.e., identifying hazardous agent present in the environment), exposure surveillance (i.e., observing occurrence of exposure to hazard), and outcome surveillance (i.e., performing an analysis of the health event). As modeling health services is explained by visual examples (and as it is very commonly practiced as well) and identifying health inequalities were mentioned in last week’s lecture, I will skip on these explanations.
Keywords: Epidemiology, Spatial Misalignment, and Interpolation.