Media

Geographic Information System and Disease Surveillance

20 Jun 2006

 

The Geographic Information System (GIS) team, which belongs to the Department of Geography of the University of Hong Kong (HKU), strives to apply GIS in the realm of public health and disease surveillance. During the outbreak of SARS in 2003, HKU was the first institution in Hong Kong to map out and report the disease occurrences and frequencies on a daily basis.

GIS is a technology for processing spatial data into information through geocoding and address matching. An important function of GIS is display and visualization which helps put events in spatial context. During the SARS epidemic, the team has made use of GIS, together with hospital admissions data, to work out the disease mapping and spatial analysis. The team's work and research efforts on disease mapping have brought international attention with an invitation from the World Health Organisation (WHO) to participate in designing and offering a course on Spatial Analysis in Human Disease Surveillance and Epidemic Response. The team also collaborated with WHO in a research study in assessing the applicability of GIS approach in estimating population sizes in emergency situations.

A press briefing will be held this Thursday in which a GIS specialised in disease surveillance in case of avian flu or other infectious diseases outbreak will be introduced. Moreover, the team would brief members of the press on an upcoming international conference, jointly organised by HKU Department of Geography and the State Key Laboratory of Resources and Environmental Information System (LREIS) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, during which more than 150 international and local experts would discuss the best practices in the fields of public health and disease surveillance. Details of the press briefing are as follows:-

Date: June 22, 2006 (Thursday)
Time: 3:00pm
Venue: Room 211, 2/F, Hui Oi Chow Science Building, Main Campus, HKU

For enquiries, please contact Elsie Leung at 2859 2600.