Monday, December 4. 2006

GIS Serves: Report from World AIDS Day

I have to admit that had I not heard several reports from the BBC, I'd not have known last Friday was World AIDS Day. GIS it turns out is in the mix of tools to treat those infected.

In countries like Tanzania, DHS [Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) project, with primary funding from the US Agency for International Development (USAID)] staff is using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to help plan the location of HIV prevention and care programs. Researchers use GIS to map where HIV positive people live in relation to health care services, national borders, major highways, and trucking routes. This detailed picture contributes to a better understanding of the epidemic, and how to slow its spread.

This is good to know. I spent too many years listening to Peter Gould (one of my professors at Penn State) lament that, back in the 1980s he couldn't get detailed enough data (due to reporting and privacy rules) to model the spread in detail. What he did acquire was key to his book, The Slow Plague.