Remote Sensing and GIS for Identifying and Monitoring the Environmental Factors Associated with Vector-borne Disease: An Overview

The deterioration of ecology environment has proved to induce various vector-borne diseases directly or indirectly. The diseases and epidemic situations erupted recently have a robust relationship with the worsening of environment conditions. Vector-borne diseases are plaguing much of the world, though some remarkable achievements have been gained in the battle against vector-borne diseases. The threats to the public health from vector-borne diseases are at least as important now as at any time in history, especially in developing countries. Most of the vector-borne diseases are associated with specific environmental factors. Control of vector-borne diseases requires the knowledge of the ecology of habitats and breeding sites of vectors, and understanding the life cycles of vectors and pathogens. The past few years have seen a rapid development in spatial information technologies represented by 3S (GIS, RS, GPS), which are suitable for identifying and monitoring environmental targets associated with vector-borne diseases. Combined with other mathematical analysis toolboxes, spatial information technologies provide a new powerful solution to analyzing and predicting the spatial-temporal patterns of vector- borne diseases, which will be helpful for risk assessment and disease prevention. This article gives a general review of the major environmental factors, including climate factor, land use/land cover, hydrologic factor and terrain factor, and analyses briefly the mechanism of each factor acting on vector-borne diseases, then summarizes the major achievements of related work on identifying and monitoring the environmental factors with remote sensing and geographic information system.