Mod 1

medical geography: the placement of humans and animals

  • socio-cultural: aids in health administration (ie hospital placement, vaccine location/rings)

  • investigate health issues with concepts, methodologies, and technologies from geography

John Snow

  • father of epidemiology

  • london cholera outbreak (Vibrio chlorae)

  • infected water plumbing due to sewage

  • use medical geography

vector borne diseases

  • ring of fire

  • spatial overlay

  • vegetation index to surveil the habitat mosquitoes like

    • land cover: urban, rural

    • species can adapt to location (city vs rural)

    • temp

    • stack layers in geographical overlay to identify key hotspots

Prediction & Modeling

  • anticipation of endemics

    • GLEAM: influenza monitoring

    • take diff pieces of data

Health Admin + Distribution

  • hospitals, homes, & transportation network

  • network analysis

    • simplify it in patterns

  • geography is the study of location but there are diff types of locations

    • regions, zones, disease risks areas, hotspots

Health

  1. measurable

    1. bioinformation: blood pressure, weight etc.

  2. continuing property

    1. changes continuously over time and space

  3. individualized property

    1. different health status for each individual due to varios individual-specific exposures

  4. insults

    1. health can resist, overcome, and recover from insults

    2. one health: interaction comes form surrounding environment

Disease types

  1. chronic/acute

  2. degenerative

  3. infectious

  4. contagious

3 Step Research Design

  1. Conceptual: possible contributing factors to a health issue

  2. methodology: plan of how to test the relationship between the health issue and contributing factors

    1. exploring study design types

  3. Implementation: data collection, mapping, stat analysis

Cohort Study: a study in which two or more groups of people that are free of the health outcomes and differ according to the extent of the exposure (exposed vs unexposed) are compared with respect to the health outcome incidence

Cross-sectional: Observational study that describes characteristics of a population at a particular point in time or over a short period of time and compares two or more groups from that population across some variable

Case-control: An observational study where a group of people with a disease or an outcome (cases) are compared with people without the disease/lack of outcome experience (control) to see if the two groups have differing exposures that account for the differences {Less effective}

Triangle of Human Ecology of Diseases (on exam)

natural: physical, chemical, biotic (vectors)

built: man made

social: social circle/culture