BACKGROUND The availability of geographic information from cancer and birth defect registries has increased public demands for investigation of perceived disease clusters. Many neighborhood-level cluster investigations are methodologically problematic, while maps made from registry data often ignore latency and many known risk factors. Population-based case-control and cohort studies provide a ...

While numerous methods have been proposed to test for spatial cluster detection, in particular for discrete outcome data (e.g., disease incidence), few have been available for continuous data that are subject to censoring. This article provides an extension of the spatial scan statistic (Kulldorff, 1997, Communications in Statistics 26, 1481-1496) for censored outcome data and further proposes ...

Bois noir (BN) grapevine disease is associated with ‘Candidatus Phytoplasma solani’ (CaPsol), a pathogen complex ecology including multiple insect vectors and plant hosts. A key point to improve the effectiveness of BN control strategies consists in determining epidemiological role ground-cover weeds. The present study employed multidisciplinary approach, based on application spatial (spatial a...