Infectious disease and climate change: detecting contributing factors and predicting future outbreaks

The spread of infectious diseases worldwide is a cause for concern in areas traditionally susceptible to these diseases and in areas where these diseases have been previously unknown. This work concentrates on diseases for which global infection rates have been increasing and which are transmitted by mobile agents, or vectors. For example, the mosquito is the vector responsible for the transmission of malaria, dengue and viral encephalitis. Identification of the factors, particularly environmental factors which can be detected from satellite imagery, which are highly correlated to outbreaks of these diseases is an important aspect of this research. Development of a system which will monitor these factors, as well as short term climate variations, such as El Nino events, is also necessary to provide risk assessments for susceptible regions so that intervention strategies may be employed to prevent or limit the impact of many vector-borne diseases. This paper describes a geographical information system that has been populated with climatic, geographic, and disease data used to distinguish correlations between the different data sets. The system provides a graphical user interface that allows for a spatial representation of the number of disease cases to be overlaid on a variety of satellite-derived parameters and geographic data. The geographical information system is the tool which, when combined with satellite-derived products, provides a framework for studying disease outbreaks.