ABSTRACT
Spatial epidemiology is the description and analysis of geographical data, specifically health data in the form of counts of mortality or morbidity and factors that may explain variations in those counts over space. These may include demographic and environmental factors together with genetic, and infectious risk factors (Elliott & Wartenberg, 2004). It has a long history dating back to the mid-1800s when John Snow’s map of cholera cases in London in 1854 provided an early example of geographical health analyses that aimed to identify possible causes of outbreaks of infectious diseases (Hempel, 2014). Since then, advances in statistical methodology together with the increasing availability of data recorded at very high spatial and temporal resolution has lead to great advances in spatial and, more recently, spatiotemporal epidemiology.
