ABSTRACT

The continued uptake of electronic health information technologies across high- and low-resource settings alike reflects an increasing recognition of the valuable contributions of data-driven decision making throughout the healthcare sector. The wealth of spatially referenced disease data the systems provide, coupled with the ready availability of remote sensing image products and powerful geographical information system packages for desktop computers, makes possible the production of high-resolution disease risk maps for use by multiple potential stakeholders. Prevalence data represent the observed proportion of individuals in a given population with some measurable disease characteristic at a particular time, such as the proportion of villagers having a microscopically patent blood density of malaria parasites. When examined at the finest granularity, for example, at the household or individual level, the factors shaping the transmission risk of any particular infectious disease may seem overwhelmingly complex; well beyond our ability to enumerate and measure.