In line with growing public, government and media interest in environmental and health issues spatial (or geographical) epidemiology is an increasing field of research, concerned with analysis of geo-referenced health outcome data. This involves mapping the location of disease cases or regional summary statistics as well as the analysis of the mapped data using spatial statistical methods.
The book is aimed to provide an overview of the main statistical methods and recent research work in the field of spatial epidemiology. The target audience are medical statisticians, epidemiologists, environmental statisticians, and researchers in public health, aside postgraduate students of statistics or epidemiology. However, this is not an introductory text. The reader needs some knowledge in spatial statistics and epidemiology, e.g. there is no definition of the K-function or certain types of bias.
The book is divided into two parts. Part one gives an introduction to The Nature of Spatial Epidemiology, provides some definitions and terminology, discusses map construction and basic methods for iterative modelling strategies: exploratory analysis, model-fitting, residual analysis and re-examination of the model-fitting process. The second part covers Important Problems in Spatial Epidemiology, with detailed coverage of different types of spatial epidemiological studies, i.e. disease mapping, ecological analysis, disease clustering, geographical disease surveillance and infectious disease modelling.
The text is well structured. The methods are discussed from the point of view of both two basic types of data: case event data and tract count data. And discussion covers issues of modelling, estimation, testing and extensions to the space-time problem. Furthermore, several data examples are used to motivate discussion of various modelling issues and to provide insight into the nature of the data which arise in this field. Appendices discuss and describe MCMC methods as well as available software for analysing spatial epidemiological data.
This valuable monograph starts with the word ''spatial" and ends with ''surveillance" and in between the reader finds a coherent and comprehensive view of the concepts and tools on this rapidly growing field of research. Because there is considerable scope for development of new methods, some part of the text is speculative in nature providing fruitful avenues for further research. I really enjoyed reading this volume.