Z_GIS presented HEALTHY FUTURES results at IECID conference

From 23-25 March 2015, the Impact of Environmental Changes on Infectious Diseases conference (IECID) took place at the Melia Sitges hotel in Sitges, Spain. The conference covered areas like the impact of current and predicted future environmental changes on infectious disease dynamics in people, wildlife, and livestock across the globe, and what actions need to be taken.

At the conference, the EC FP7 project HEALTHY FUTURES sponsored a session entitled “Assessing the health impacts of environmental changes in eastern Africa - spatial modelling tools for integrated risk assessment”, where the project as such as well as some of the main outcomes of the project were presented by the scientific coordinator Prof. David Taylor and further members of the project consortium.

Z_GIS was represented by Dr. Michael Hagenlocher who gave the talk at the conference (S. Kienberger, M. Hagenlocher and A. Tompkins on “Risk to malaria infection in East Africa – integration of environmental and socioeconomic factors”) and presented three posters at two dedicated poster sessions:

·        Mapping malaria risk and vulnerability in the United Republic of Tanzania (Hagenlocher & Castro)

·        Spatial variation and factors associated with dengue fever outbreaks in an urban environment of Colombia (Delmelle et al.)

·        A web-based risk and vulnerability atlas for vector-borne diseases in eastern Africa (Kienberger et al.)

The talk of Michael was attended by approximately 150 people and triggered interesting discussions, while the poster presenting the HEALTHY FUTURES Atlas was highlighted as particularly interesting by The Lancet Infectious Diseases (the leading clinical infectious disease journal) on their Twitter account.