Utilization of Geoinformation Tools for Dengue ...

Dengue has now emerged as one of the major public health problems in Malaysia. It was first reported in 1901 in Penang and since then the disease has become endemic concentrating mostly in urban areas. The objective of this study was to utilize geo-information tool to determine high risk areas for the dengue outbreak. This study examined a total of 307 confirmed dengue fever cases, geo-coded by address in Seberang Prai area between Jan 2005 and December 2010, which were included in the study. The results were drawn from a measurement of the dengue incidence in order to determine the severity and magnitude of outbreak transmission. Measurement of the dengue incidence found that there were areas with significant high value. This suggested that areas within Seberang Prai area had different temporal characteristics for dengue occurrence. The utilization of geo-information tool enabled to identify higher-risk areas for the occurrence of dengue fever. Even though case notification data are subjected to bias, this information is available to the health services and can lead to important conclusions, recommendations and hypotheses. As a recommendation, the geo-information tool can be utilized by public health officials to characterize dengue rather than rely on the traditional case incidence data.