17 February 2017
There are four major applications for GIS in health geography:
- Spatial epidemiology focuses on analysing the spatial distribution of disease in relation to demographic, socioeconomic and environmental factors eg. Dr. John Snow’s map of cholera deaths.
- Environmental hazards focuses on the effect of the environment on human health i.e. are people living near nuclear plants more likely to develop cancer?
- Modeling health services i.e. how accessible are health services in a given area?
- Identifying health inequalities i.e. do people in lower socio-economic groups have less access to health services?
One discussion I found particularly interesting was the one we had about the effect that the expansion of the AIDS surveillance definition had on health data. In 1993 the survellience definition of AIDs (originally published in 1987) expanded to include all human immunodeficiency virus (CDC, 1993). This resulted in a huge spike in the number of reported cases of AIDS. I found this interesting because it really highlighted the subjective nature of data collection–data and the interpretation of data is ultimately defined by the one who designed the study.
References
Klinkenberg, B. (2017). GIS and Health Geography. [Lecture notes]. Retrieved from http://ibis.geog.ubc.ca/courses/geob479/notes/Handouts/Lecture06.pdf
Local, state, and territorial health departments division of HIV/AIDS, National Center for Infectious Diseases, CDC. (1993). Impact pf the Expanded AIDS Surveillance Case Definition on AIDS Case Reporting– United States, First Quarter, 1993. (Report No. 42(16);308-310). Retrieved from https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00020374.htm