Climate-based health monitoring systems for eco-climatic conditions associated with infectious diseases

Despite a century of confidence and optimism in modern medicine and technology inspired by their often successful prevention and control efforts, infectious diseases remain an omnipresent, conspicuous major challenge to public health. Effective detection and control of infectious diseases require predictive and proactive efficient methods that provide early warning of an epidemic activity. Of particular relevance to these efforts is linking information at the landscape and coarser scales to data at the scale of the epidemic activity. In recent years, landscape epidemiology has used satellite remote sensing and geographic information systems as the technology capable of providing, from local to global scales, spatial and temporal climatic patterns that may influence the intensity of a vector-borne disease and predicts risk conditions associated with an epidemic. This article provides a condensed, and selective look at classical material and recent research about remote sensing and GIS (geographic information system) applications in public health.