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ABSTRACT
This article describes the principles and the different techniques of spatial analysis for epidemiology and health geography: mapping, analysis of heterogeneity and spatial continuity, trends, homogeneous areas, cluster detection, geometries, spatial-temporal analysis, etc. Spatial analysis is also used in the development of many applications: modelling of epidemics, warning systems, crisis management systems, risk prevention and analysis systems, vaccination campaigns, and surveys.
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Marc SOURIS: Emeritus Research Director - UMR "Emerging Viruses Unit", Aix-Marseille Univ. – IRD – INSERM, Marseille, France
INTRODUCTION
Faced with the evidence of multiple transmissions of diseases from animals to humans, an integrated, systemic approach has gradually become essential to better understand, assess and prepare for health risks: it is necessary to study diseases in their global context, taking into account not only potential patients, but also all the players involved in the emergence and spread of diseases. There are many such players: pathogens, human and animal populations, vectors, with biological, geographical, environmental, behavioral, social, economic and other risk factors.
Heterogeneity is the key to epidemiology, in the sense that uniform risk in observed data does not allow epidemiological differences to be associated with factors that might have etiological significance. Heterogeneity also concerns the spatial distribution of diseases: health phenomena are rarely randomly distributed in space, and their spatial distribution often reflects risk factors linked to geographical factors and proximity relationships between individuals, which make it possible to decipher them. Many processes depend on proximity, either through contamination or contagion processes, or through geographical causal relationships with environmental characteristics. The study of heterogeneity in the spatial distribution of health phenomena therefore proves to be important in the analysis and understanding of these phenomena and the identification of their risk factors: when risk varies from one place to another, geographical location is an important explanatory variable, either because it reflects an element of risk determined by the environment (be it an element of the natural or sociocultural environment associated with a place), or because people with similar risk characteristics live together, or because risk is linked to a process of contagion by proximity.
This article introduces the conceptual and methodological foundations underpinning spatial analysis in epidemiology, whose various methods and tools will be described in detail in the associated article
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Bibliography
Bibliography
Standards and norms
- The European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity – Revised Edition 2023. Berlin. DOI 10.26356/ECOC - ALLEA - 2023
Regulations
France: Decree no. 2000-1282 of December 26, 2000 (JO of December 29) creating the Agence technique de l'information sur l'hospitalisation and modifying the public health code.
Legislative and regulatory basis for PMSI
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Research and training centers (non-exhaustive list)
EHESP, METIS department https://www.ehesp.fr/
UMR UVE https://www.mediterranee-infection.com/recherche/uve/
UMR 6266 CNRS IDEES
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