Paper Review On Health Geography – Miki Yin (Jie Liang)

HFMD is transmitted from one to others via direct contact with saliva, fluid from nose or blisters. In addition, it can also be caused by contact with food or water contaminated with fecal droplets, nose discharge, fluid, or saliva of the infectious person.

In the research, they developed a hazard zonation model to highlight the risks of Hands, feet, mouth disease across space. They linked the model to geospatial data using GIS multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) techniques and Weight Linear Regression to produce a hazard zonation map.

The objective of their research is to better understand the spatial nature of outbreaks which can be useful for surveillance and prevention measures before any outbreak occurs

MCE in GIS is used to compare and evaluate multiple criteria for decision making and, in this case, they have to determine spatial layers representing the criteria.

Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) looks at the criteria in a hierarchal structure so objective, attribute, then alternative criteria for their goal. AHP sets a relative importance of the comparison of two variable (criteria) based on a pair wise comparison from scale 1-9 equally important to most important.

It is stated that the disease occurs the most often in northern Thailand, so they plan on covering 20% of the entire area of Thailand, to account for previous data on disease occurrence, socio-economic factor, and physical factor criteria. The most important criteria are disease occurrence from 2002-2012, and then socio-economic factor including population density, road density, and land use. The physical factor is topography. They classified layers into 5 levels

The AHP for hazard zonation evaluation resulted in the highest importance of weight value of 22.758 % for criteria 1disease occurrence 2012, followed by criteria 2 with a weight value of 17.812 %. The lowest importance weight value of 1.016 % was calculated for criteria 14.