The use of gis to study the spatial variation of diseases: a case of western region, Ghana

The ability to formulate disease control programmes and put strategic action plans into practice has become an important issue for Regional Health Directorates in Ghana. An important factor in disease control programmes is to correlate variations in different communities with environmental factors using spatially reliable data. To achieve this, spatial distribution maps for predominant diseases such as malaria, skin infection, Respiratory Tract Infection (RTI), asthma and diarrhea for the year 2005 were created. In this study, a database of disease statistics and the geographical information representing the boundaries as well as the centre of the administrative units of the Western Region of Ghana were built using cartographic and GIS techniques – choropleth mapping to examine the spatial distribution of the selected diseases. The results show that there is a strong correlation between mining activities and the prevalence of diseases under study in the Western Region.