We utilize a variety of disease systems in order to answer questions about the spatial and temporal distribution of disease.
Cooling Centers
In support of ADHS’s CDC BRACE Project, we mapped the 2022 Cooling Centers in Pima County. As the temperature rise, these places are available as heat refuge, hydration stations, or supply pick up. This map was made starting with the Tucson Pima Collaboration to End Homelessness‘s Summer Sun Respite Sites. These locations were updated by reaching out to organizations who been listed in prior years to confirm hours, restrictions and COVID requirements. Libraries have been used as cooling centers in prior years; stopped as did so many things due to COVID-restrictions; but are back! Please visit the Pima County Library website for more information. Information about Pools and Splash Pads are available from the City of Tucson and Pima County websites. Check below for a tutorial on Spatial Optimization.
Infectious Causes of Cancers
Working in collaboration with Drs Robin Harris, Leslie Dennis and Eyal Oren, we’ve built a team investigating cancers caused by infection, particularly Helicobacter pylori and gastric cancer. This has morphed in a variety of directions including looking into antibiotic resistance and other infectious causes of cancer.
How the environment in which we live influences our health
Recently, with my colleague Julie Jernberg from the College of Medicine, we’ve been developing material to support clinicians treating the novel health effects in their region. You can find that material and more about the project at our website, including free CME on Heat and Heat Related Illness. This dovetails with the CDC BRACE framework for cities and states to prepare for health hazards, which I am working on with colleagues in CAPLA (Ladd Keith), ASU (Dave Hondula), ADHS and Pima County Health Department.
Forecasting Chikungunya in the Caribbean
In response to the DARPA InnoCentive Challenge, we (Professor Joceline Lega and Dr Brown) developed a tool to estimate the total number, duration and peak incidence of chikungunya cases in the 2014-2015 Chikungunya outbreak in the Caribbean. We are working to validate the model on other diseases and other areas and will soon upload the tool here.
Factors influencing mosquito abundance
We are continuing to quantify how the environment we live in influences the health risks we are exposed to. What mosquitoes we are exposed to is dependent on the place we find ourselves. We intuitively know that when we think about diseases like malaria and dengue (which are not considered endemic to the us – i.e., we primarily see only travel associated cases), but we do expect cases of West Nile virus each year. We’ve taken a basic ecological approach to it and have investigated flight ranges by location and a soon to be out paper looking at what factors best predicted WNV vector abundance regionally across the US.
Datasets
Eastern equine Encephalitis
The data used for our analysis predicting spread of EEE incidence in the US is available for download:
Body Heat Storage
Sam Chambers operationalized Body Heat Storage for Arizona: Body Heat Storage data for Arizona. It is editable and, for convenience LST is also available. If your foal is to calculate the values by census tract, just run a zonal statistics as table tool. The raster input would be the BHS and the tracts the vector input. The zone field would be the tract number. Afterward, join that table back to the original census tract data using the zone field and export that as a new shapefile. The final product will be the census tracts with a field of BHS values. Export as a csv table if the spatial dataset isn’t necessary.
Please cite the BHS paper:
Chambers, S.N., Brown, H.E., Keith, L. and Austhof, E., 2023. Development of a geographic human heat balance equation to support public health analyses: An Arizona urban sun corridor application. Remote Sensing Applications: Society and Environment, p.101009.
Dr Chambers did some additional fine-tuning to make it work statewide. Here is a good reference for that:
Chambers, S.N., Boyce, G.A., Martínez, D.E., Bongers, C.C. and Keith, L., 2023. The contribution of physical exertion to heat-related illness and death in the Arizona borderlands. Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology, p.100590.
This work is based off the basic heat balance equation:
Cramer, M.N. and Jay, O., 2019. Partitional calorimetry. Journal of Applied Physiology, 126(2), pp.267-277.
Spatial Optimization
A tutorial on how to use the Spatial Optimization tool to identify potential locations, in our case, for cooling centers: