Document Type : Original Article

Author

• Elahe Akbari

Department of remote sensing and Geographic Information System, Faculty of Geography and Environmental Science, Hakim Sabzevari University, Sabzevar, Iran.

Abstract

Visceral Leishmaniasis (VL) is a zoonotic vector born disease. Several geographical risk factors affect VL incidence including air temperature, critical to the development of sand fly. Few and scattered meteorological stations tend to record air temperature with field measurements which costly and time consuming, albeit its evaluations for preventive activities are crucial for epidemiologists. Temperature can be determined by continuous surfaces extracted via Geographic Information System. Surfaces were produced by using geostatistical methods including Ordinary Kriging/Cokriging, Universal Kriging/Cokriging in Kalaybar and Khoda-afarin districts of Iran. I determined hot spot and spatial auto-correlation analysis of VL disease by Getis-Ord Gi* statistic and global Moran's I, too. Given the z-score and p-value of 2.22 and 0.026, respectively, showed less than 5 % likelihood that this VL clustered pattern could be the result of random chance. Estimating MAE=1.9897, RMSE=2.714 and PE =13.72, was indicated the Ordinary Cokriging method was the superior method in this study. VL incidence correlated closely with air temperature as Pearson’s coefficient. Epidemiologists should expand their studies on other villages similar to the involved disease-stricken villages in terms of air temperature. Albeit in these villages, the probability of sand fly activities and VL incidence are higher than others, so preventative activities seem necessary.

Keywords

• Visceral Leishmaniasis
• Hot spot and spatial auto-correlation analysis
• Air Temperature
• Geostatistics
• Geographical Information System (GIS)

Main Subjects

• Remote sensing and Gis