Tele-epidemiology
Encyclopedia
Tele-epidemiology is a methodological and application area of epidemiology
Epidemiology
Epidemiology is the study of health-event, health-characteristic, or health-determinant patterns in a population. It is the cornerstone method of public health research, and helps inform policy decisions and evidence-based medicine by identifying risk factors for disease and targets for preventive...

 concerned with the application of space-based systems (communication
Communication
Communication is the activity of conveying meaningful information. Communication requires a sender, a message, and an intended recipient, although the receiver need not be present or aware of the sender's intent to communicate at the time of communication; thus communication can occur across vast...

, Earth observation
Earth observation
Earth observation is the gathering of information about planet Earth’s physical, chemical and biological systems. It is used to monitor and assess the status of, and changes in, the natural environment and the built environment. In recent years, Earth observation has become technologically more and...

, positioning system
Positioning system
A positioning system is a mechanism for determining the location of an object in space. Technologies for this task exist ranging from worldwide coverage with meter accuracy to workspace coverage with sub-millimetre accuracy.- Interplanetary systems :...

s, Geographical Information Systems, biostatistics
Biostatistics
Biostatistics is the application of statistics to a wide range of topics in biology...

, etc.) in the study of the space and time distribution of health events or disease process in population
Population
A population is all the organisms that both belong to the same group or species and live in the same geographical area. The area that is used to define a sexual population is such that inter-breeding is possible between any pair within the area and more probable than cross-breeding with individuals...

s.

In this broader sense, the term includes applications of all space-based systems to the field of epidemiology. The use of a satellite communication system to support the investigation of an infectious disease
Infectious disease
Infectious diseases, also known as communicable diseases, contagious diseases or transmissible diseases comprise clinically evident illness resulting from the infection, presence and growth of pathogenic biological agents in an individual host organism...

 outbreak
Outbreak
Outbreak is a term used in epidemiology to describe an occurrence of disease greater than would otherwise be expected at a particular time and place. It may affect a small and localized group or impact upon thousands of people across an entire continent. Two linked cases of a rare infectious...

, the use of a remote-sensing satellite to recognize and locate physical features on Earth
Earth
Earth is the third planet from the Sun, and the densest and fifth-largest of the eight planets in the Solar System. It is also the largest of the Solar System's four terrestrial planets...

 (for example, an industrial
Industry
Industry refers to the production of an economic good or service within an economy.-Industrial sectors:There are four key industrial economic sectors: the primary sector, largely raw material extraction industries such as mining and farming; the secondary sector, involving refining, construction,...

 plant suspected of a point source contamination
Contamination
Contamination is the presence of a minor and unwanted constituent in material, physical body, natural environment, at a workplace, etc.-Specifics:"Contamination" also has more specific meanings in science:...

 of air or water
Water
Water is a chemical substance with the chemical formula H2O. A water molecule contains one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms connected by covalent bonds. Water is a liquid at ambient conditions, but it often co-exists on Earth with its solid state, ice, and gaseous state . Water also exists in a...

) or non-visible characteristics of a land area (for example, calculation of the NDVI index in relation to the distribution of species of mosquito
Mosquito
Mosquitoes are members of a family of nematocerid flies: the Culicidae . The word Mosquito is from the Spanish and Portuguese for little fly...

es) to assess health risk in surrounding populations, or the use of global positioning satellites (GPS) to track the migration of animals to better understand possible route of malaria
Malaria
Malaria is a mosquito-borne infectious disease of humans and other animals caused by eukaryotic protists of the genus Plasmodium. The disease results from the multiplication of Plasmodium parasites within red blood cells, causing symptoms that typically include fever and headache, in severe cases...

 transmission are all illustrations of tele-epidemiology.

By recent usage, the term often designates the cross-disciplinary area linking specifically the applications of satellite technologies for earth observations (remote-sensing) to epidemiological research, health surveillance, and field support during health emergency response. In this restricted sense, the area of tele-epidemiology is closely related to the domain of landscape epidemiology
Landscape epidemiology
Landscape epidemiology draws some of its roots from the field of landscape ecology. Just as the discipline of landscape ecology is concerned with analyzing both pattern and process in ecosystems across time and space, landscape epidemiology can be used to analyze both risk patterns and...

. The United Nation Programme on Space Applications often refers to telehealth
Telehealth
Telehealth is the delivery of health-related services and information via telecommunications technologies. Telehealth could be as simple as two health professionals discussing a case over the telephone or as sophisticated as doing robotic surgery between facilities at different ends of the...

 for applications linking communication systems (and for all health disciplines such as teleophtalmology, telesurgery etc...) and to "tele-epidemiology" in this more restricted sense.

External links

Télé-épidemiologie, MEDES: http://www.medes.fr/home_fr/telemedecine/teleepidemiologie.html

United Nation Office for Outer Space Affairs: http://www.oosa.unvienna.org/oosa/SAP/comm/tele.html

Redgems website http://www.redgems.org/spip.php?rubrique64
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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