|
Dear Colleagues:
The King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre will host a symposium entitled "Spatial and Temporal Clustering of Diseases and Risk Assessment in Public Health" on 15-16 Shawwal
1424/09-10 December 2003, in Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Disease mapping and risk assessment is now a major focus of interest in the areas of epidemiology and public health. The geographical distribution of the incidence of disease has an important role to play in the
development of understanding the origin and causes of many diseases.
Historical examples of studies involving spatial and temporal clustering of diseases and risk assessment are many, ranging from Snow's 1854 study of cholera in London to asthma in Barcelona in the 1980's. The studies
involve a common sequence of activities, accurate maps of disease incidence, assessment of aggregations of disease, and linking aggregation to causative factors.
Geographical Information Systems (GIS) have emerged as an innovative tool used by public health officers and epidemiologists. In Saudi Arabia a great deal of data are currently being collected through well-developed
public health surveillance systems, large community, based surveys, and disease registries. The usefulness of these data would be enhanced through the introduction and wider use of GIS technology.
This symposium is being organized to gather individuals with an interest in GIS to demonstrate atlases of different diseases in Saudi Arabia, to illustrate the usefulness of GIS in public health, and to address the
utility of such analyses in the inferring causative factors for disease.
Specific topics to be addressed include cancer maps, GIS applications in public health, GIS in epidemiological surveillance, cardiovascular diseases maps, and statistical modeling of spatial/temporal heterogeneity of
disease.
On behalf of the Organizing Committee, we would like to cordially invite you to attend and participate in this timely symposium and eagerly look forward to welcoming you.
Edward B. De Vol, PhD
Chairman
Mohamed Shoukri, PhD
Co-chairman
|
