Abstract
Abstract. Spatial characteristics reveal the concentration of vaccine-preventable disease in Africa and the Near East and that disease dispersion is variable depending on disease. The exception is whooping cough, which has a highly variable center of concentration from year to year. Measles exhibited the only statistically significant spatial autocorrelation among all the diseases under investigation. Hottest spots of measles are in Africa and coldest spots are in United States, warm spots are in Near East and cool spots are in Western Europe. Finally, cases of measles could not be explained by the independent variables, including Gini index, health expenditure, or rate of immunization. Since the literature confirms that each of the selected variables is considered determinants of disease dissemination, it is anticipated that the global dataset of disease cases was influenced by reporting bias.
Highlights
The concept for this project originates from a news report that aired on National Public Radio on 25 January 2014, entitled, How Vaccine Fears Fueled the Resurgence of Preventable Diseases (NPR, 2014)
The most notable limitation is the dataset, which was retrieved from the Council on Foreign Relations, followed by the nature of working with a global dataset, and joining the points to polygons, which reduced the overall observations to fifty
The initial consideration behind using this specific dataset was to reproduce the maps within the news report and examine their claim that there is a resurgence of vaccine-preventable disease due to declining vaccine rates
Summary
The concept for this project originates from a news report that aired on National Public Radio on 25 January 2014, entitled, How Vaccine Fears Fueled the Resurgence of Preventable Diseases (NPR, 2014). When a critical portion of a community is immunized against a contagious disease, most members of the community are protected against the disease because there is little opportunity for an outbreak and even those who are not eligible for certain vaccines—such as infants or immunocompromised individuals—get some protection because the spread of contagious disease is contained (CDC, 2012) This is known as "community immunity." In the case of measles, for example, a minimum threshold of 83% must be maintained (CDC, 2014). Implementing GIS to analyze disease diffusion arising from spatially non-stationary processes, such as ordinary least squares (OLS) and geographically weighted regression (GWR) is limited (Goto, 2013; Hu, 2012) The objectives of this project are to: 1) Identify spatial characteristics of vaccine-preventable diseases by measuring central tendency, dispersion, and directional trend The number of disease cases serves as the dependent variable and cases were normalized by the total population of each country
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