Diet is a complex aggregate of foods and behaviors. The food is constituted of a • wide variety of intended and unintended chemicals which may act singly on human metabolism, but more likely act in groups in a synergistic fashion. The study of nutrition and disease in aggregates of human beings—nutritional • epidemiology—is hampered by the dif fi culty in accurately characterizing this complex ...

Spatial patterns of disease occurrence across a landscape are likely products of both the ecological processes giving rise to underlying epidemics and the physical pathways of disease spread. Spatially explicit epidemic models often rely on assumptions about system boundaries and processes for spread that may not faithfully represent true patterns of host or vector distribution and movements. A...

Earth-observing satellites have only recently been exploited for the measurement of environmental variables of relevance to epidemiology and public health. Such work has relied on sensors with spatial, spectral and geometric constraints that have allowed large-area questions associated with the epidemiology of vector-borne diseases to be addressed. Moving from pretty maps to pragmatic control t...

This chapter provides an overview of geographic information systems, spatial analysis and spatial statistics, and predictive ecological niche modeling as they apply to disease ecology. I provide a conceptual model of the epidemiology and outbreak ecology of anthrax and the landscape ecology of the pathogen to these two components of the anthrax-transmission and spore-survival model. Spatial clu...

Geographic information systems combined with methods of spatial analysis provide powerful new tools for understanding the epidemiology of diseases and for improving disease prevention and control. In this study, the spatial distribution of a newly recognized tick-borne disease, human granulocytic ehrlichiosis (HGE), was investigated for nonrandom patterns and clusters in an area known to be end...