In 2013, the author of this chapter worked as an epidemic surveillance professional for the government health ministry and tried to give a better representation of the affected places in a rural town, Nandayure, located in the Guanacaste region of Costa Rica, Central America. So, it is very easy to locate reference places like parks, hospitals, or buildings and approach the address of a patient’s home, and this way, the epidemiologist can make the mapping free and easy geocoding of the attribute of the table linked to the corresponding marks in the map. It has the possibility for searching places by typing the name while using it for mapping and also by copying the geocoded data from the search bar placemark, which appears on the surface of earth satellite imagery or the commercial sites in search. Some of them like Arc Gis™ are licensed and have an important economic cost some other like Quantum Gis™ are open source but not easy to use without appropriate training some other like EpiInfo™ allows to create variable income of cases and associate them with the geocoded data.īut Google Earth Pro™ has proven to have an extra advantage over classic GIS software. But these software are for specialized and trained personnel. Geographic information systems (GISs) are commonly used by professionals for analysis of geocoded data over maps.
Besides, it gives the availability of saving the spatial data with the variables, in files that can be mailed and displayed in smartphones and PCs with Google Earth installed and with outcomes that have a format compatible to GIS classic software. The technological advances gives most people access to latitude and longitude in smartphones and easy access to a GIS-like free software such as Google Earth™ (GE), an intuitive and effective program for a fast map of the case addresses geocoded, an easy way to display layers imported from formats like Shapefiles extension, and showing over those layers Excel tables with the patient variables and geocoded data from the sheet. When the epidemiologists need to analyze the distribution of cases in a study or the outbreak trend of cases over time, usually they use graphics for representing the magnitude over time (by incidence and prevalence), tables for describing the variables of the affected people (by race, age, sex, weight, and social condition), and maps describing the spread of places and distribution over time.
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