ABSTRACT
The study of spatial diffusion has had a long history within geography and, as described in the general reviews by Haggett, Cliff and Frey and Brown, spread models of various kinds have been applied to a wide range of geographical phenomena. This chapter reviews some of the recent geographical work on disease diffusion. The simplest form of the Hamer-Soper epidemic diffusion model was originally developed by Hamer in 1906 to describe the recurring sequence of measles waves affecting large English cities in the late Victorian period and has been greatly modified over the ensuing decades to incorporate probabilistic, spatial and public health components. The chapter presents recent work on the spread of infectious diseases viewed as epidemic waves has been reviewed. The possibility of self-mapping an epidemiological process has been made feasible by the technique of multi-dimensional scaling, MDS. Kendall has investigated the effect of the susceptible population/threshold ratio on the incidence and nature of epidemic waves.
