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ESA > Our Activities > Human Spaceflight > Space for health

Disease Surveillance

Space technologies are increasingly becoming useful tools to study and provide information on epidemics, e.g. environmental and climate influences on appearance of unusual spreading of disease.

An unfortunate side-effect of increased, faster, and cheaper travel world wide is the very much increased speed with which epidemics spread across distance parts of the Earth. This requires increased and effective vigilance supported by accurate, continuous, and speedy collection and processing of data across the globe.Space assets, infrastructure, and expertise, in particular, Earth observation, ground-positioning, and communication satellites and associated applications, are becoming key tools towards strengthening preparedness, improving surveillance, and providing effective early-warning.Moreover, environmental parameters that influence the emergence and spreading of disease can sometimes be detected from space, thus facilitating improved monitoring and early warning systems, and, together with communications and ground-positioning capabilities, thus facilitate and strengthen quick-response capacities to counter Public Health Events of International Concern (PHEIC). Satellite technologies also contribute to the development of information systems for public health (PHIS), e.g. WHO HealthMapper and follow-up systems.

Projects
A list of recent and current projects supported by ESA is given below. Further detail on some of the project is provided where it appears with hyperlink (further descriptions will be provided in the near future).

SAFE - Satellites for Epidemiology and Health Early Warning
This activity will be aimed to integrate, deploy and validate a satcom based system devoted to gather data from the field to predict communicable disease diffusion patterns and associated risks of outbreak.
Contact: Pierluigi.Mancini @ esa.int More info »»

Identifying Natural Mosquito Habitats
Development & Demonstration of EO Technology for Identifying Natural Mosquito Habitats and Predicting Malaria Risk in Africa.
Contact: Diego.Fernandez @ esa.int More info »»

EPIDEMIO - Earth Observation in Epidemiology
The objective of this DUE project is to provide EO-derived information on the environment to epidemiologists working to study, monitor & predict threats to human health.
Contact: Simon.Pinnock @ esa.int More info »»

HEWS - Health Early Warning System
This activity will be aimed to integrate, deploy and validate a satcom based system devoted to gather data from the field to predict communicable disease diffusion patterns and associated risks of outbreak.
Contact: Pierluigi.Mancini @ esa.int More info »»

Last update: 2 July 2008

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