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e-ISSN 1828-1427

  

Rivista trimestrale di Sanità Pubblica Veterinaria edita dall'Istituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentale dell'Abruzzo e del Molise ‘G. Caporale'

A quarterly journal devoted to veterinary public health, veterinary science and medicine published by the Istituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentale dell’Abruzzo e del Molise ‘G. Caporale’ in Teramo, Italy

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2007 - Volume 43 (3) July-September
   
 
Annelise Tran, Nicolas Gaidet, Grégory L’Ambert, Thomas Balenghien, Gilles Balanca, Véronique Chevalier, Valéria Soti, Cécile Ivanes, Eric Etter, Francis Schaffner, Thierry Baldet & Stéphane de la Rocque
The use of remote sensing for the ecological description of multi-host disease systems: a case study on West Nile virus in southern France 687-697
       
Summary
A large number of diseases that affect humans and animals are influenced by environmental factors. For multi-host infectious diseases, various species might be involved in the transmission process and the circulation of the pathogenic agent might result from the occurrence of certain specific association(s) between host and vector species. The need to characterise multi-species assemblage requires the development of new methods to derive integrated environmental risk factors. We have given remote sensing an ecological application to study the potential distribution of West Nile virus (WNV) in the Rhone River delta in southern France. West Nile fever is a vector-borne disease transmitted in natural cycles between birds and mosquitoes. Satellite images were used to create an ecological map on land cover. Appropriate typology was employed for the description of both hosts and vectors distributions. A database including the probability of occurrence of bird and mosquito species in each landscape unit is linked to this ecological map. Spatial and temporal information on host and vector distribution is then integrated using geographic information systems. This integrative tool is designed to test some hypotheses on the epidemiological process of WNV and to identify environmental configurations and environmental changes likely to favour the emergence of WNV.

Keywords
Ecology, Epidemiology, France, Geographic information system, Multi-host disease, Remote sensing, West Nile virus.


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