Leveraging your GIS as a Collaborative Platform

VectorMap - Using Silverlight for disease vector distribution data

—Desmond Foley, Walter Reed Army Institute of Research

Arthropods, like mosquitoes, ticks and sand flies, are important vectors of diseases, and there is a need for a spatial online database of global collection data and distribution summaries. Such a resource could provide entomologists with the results of previous arthropod surveys, and vector disease control workers and health planners with information relating arthropod distribution to vector-borne disease risk. The Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution and the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center are developing 'VectorMap', comprising arthropod collection point data stored in an ArcGIS 10 Server Silverlight application. In addition to points, environmental, vector, and disease distribution layers are available that can be compared to quantify areas of overlap where disease transmission is possible. Ready access to spatially enabled disease vector data in a GIS environment offers a larger audience richer ways to see critical inter-relationships, and think about solutions to vector-borne disease