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Do you know?

 
Malaria alone accounts for more than 300 million acute illnesses per year with at least one million deaths annually
 

Vector-borne diseases are illnesses caused by organisms or vectors, such as mosquitoes, ticks or sandflies that trasmit pathogen from one host to the other. Vector borne diseases study include creating prediction models for diseases by using satellite-derived environmental variables such as temperature, humidity, and land cover type and identifying and characterizing vector habitats. The application of remote sensing to map vector-borne diseases has evolved significantly over the recent years. 

 

 
Remote sensing is the acquiring information about an object or phenomenon without making physical contact with the object.
Ongoing Researches

Understanding the Impact of Climate Change on Human Health – Using Remote Sensing to Define Associations between Environmental Parameters and Vector-Borne Diseases

 

NASA researchers using temperature data collected via remote sensing to predict outbreaks of West Nile virus.

 

Do you know?

 
WHO estimates  in tropical and subtropical regions, there may be more than 50 million cases of dengue infection every year. 
 

Yale university professor, Maria Ana Diuk-Wasser PhD engaged in modeling the environmental and ecological drivers of vector-borne and zoonotic diseases using intensive field and laboratory-derived data

 

 

 

Why use remote sensing for Vector-Borne Disease ?

 

The use of remote sensing in study of vector-borne disease is much useful because:

 

  • Many vector-borne diseases are closely related to natural environment due to the presence, breeding and evolution of their pathogens or reservoir hosts, which rely heavily on their vectors.

 

  • Monitoring characteristics of vectors’ spatial and temporal distribution is of vital importance to the prevention and control of vector-borne diseases

 

  • Ecological models that incorporate biological data and spatial and temporal remote sensing data can improve our ability to predict the patterns and intensity of diseases

 

  • The traditional in-situ survey methods based on field detection are difficult to meet the demand of monitoring in large scale.

 

  • Remote sensing technology provides promising ways for vector borne disease monitoring and control as it fills gap of traditional in-situ survey method and excellently address the monitoring in landscape level.

 

How do we use remote sensing for Vector-Borne Disease ?

 

We can build Ecological models with the help of Remote Sensing that can improve our ability to predict the patterns and intensity of diseases. For example, the geographic range of an infected host species can be predicted by incorporating the known geographic locations of infected individuals of that species and the biological and environmental data collected via remote sensing.

 

The ecological models thus developed through the use of Remote Sensing can be further used to study processes that influence the distribution patterns of disease strains by incorporating epidemiologic and genetic data with remote sensing data. These models by the use of Remote Sensing have the ability to predict future outbreaks of a disease and the future prevalence of diseased host species and helps to identify the factors that contribute to disease spread.

 

Remote sensing can also be used to predict how large-scale changes such as climate change might affect the ecology and epidemiology of disease species and their hosts.  Remote sensing and other spatial data sets can be used to quantify natural (climate change and variability) and anthropogenic (habitat fragmentation, land use change, urbanization, etc.) changes and can be readily incorporated into predictive models to assess future scenarios. 

 

Remote Sensing Data Products
 

Multi Spectral and Multi Temporal satellite data products  are visually interpretated  and analysed that have been derived from various satellite system such as the earth observation resource satellites (Landsat TM (Thematic Mapper) satellite, French Satellite Systeme Pour l''Observation de la Terre (SPOT), Indian Remote Sensing (IRS) LISS I, LISS-II, LISS III and Panchromatic Imagery, IKONOS) and red and infrared colour aerial photographs and the meteorological satellites, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration''s Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (NOVA- AVHRR), and Radarsat-2. The interpretation and analysis of such products are used for delineating and mapping of vector breeding habitats and vector ecology. 

 

Credit:Palaniyandi, 2014

The process of remote sensing analysis

 

The process normally uses  unsupervised digital image processing of remote sensing data  followed by the geo-processing of supervised image analysis, geostatistical analysis of discriminant analysis, cluster analysis and the regression analysis shows the result of statistically significant relationship between the vector abundance, vector borne diseases and the environmental variables.

 

Credit:Palaniyandi, 2014

What is remote sensing?

What are vector-borne diseases?

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