Arthropod-borne diseases such as malaria, dengue, Chagas disease, filariasis, leishmaniasis, and trypanosomiasis place tremendous public health burdens upon developing countries. The operational value of Decision Support Systems for management of these and other arthropod-borne diseases is enhanced by a Geographic Information System (GIS) spatial backbone allowing for visualization of spatiotemporal arthropod vector and disease patterns. However, resource-poor environments in desperate need of GIS-based solutions to more effectively manage arthropod-borne diseases can be faced with the reality that even the most basic GIS data are lacking and that investment in the infrastructure (high end computers, sophisticated GIS software, technical personnel) needed to develop such data is costprohibitive. This problem was addressed by use of Google Earth which freely provides access to both satellite imagery and mapping tools capable of generating polygons, lines and placemarks.
Objective
As part of a Dengue Decision Support System project funded by the Innovative Vector Control Consortium, we used satellite imagery and mapping tools freely available through Google Earth to: 1) generate data for basic city structure that could be imported into a GIS; and 2) serve as the spatial underpinning of a Decision Support System for arthropod-borne disease management.