Remote sensing and GIS modelling applied to viral disease in Nakhonpathom Province, Thailand

Vector-borne diseases have been the most important worldwide health problem for many years and still represent a constant and serious risk to a large part of the world´s population. GIS have already been widely used in sector such as the management of natural resources, agriculture, rural and urban planning. Remotely sensed data can be used to identify, monitor and evaluate environmental factors. Also, GIS can create a link between spatial data and their related descriptive information (Non-spatial data) such as socio-economic and medical data. Both spatial and temporal change in environment condition can be important to determine the diseases emergence and transmission. Recently, GIS and remote sensing started to be used to evaluate and model the relationships between environmental factors/indicators and the incidences of viral diseases. The authors propose a methodology based on exploratory spatio-environmental results obtained from remote sensing in relation to levels of incidence of Dengue to get insights in the relationships between these two elements. GIS modeling is first used to derive spatial categories of levels of incidence of the disease. Then with an another level of GIS modelisation, spatio-environmental indicators/factors are extracted from remote sensing results. The first results obtained in the present study of the Dengue show that it would be possible to identify and localize environmental indicators and/or factors of such viral diseases. It would then open doors to the prediction of estimates of where the viral diseases could probably and spatially burst, and at what levels of incidences