Comparative analysis of the incidence of tick-borne borreliosis and tick-borne encephalitis in the regions of Russian Federation by using a geographic information system in 2000-2006

An ArcView geographic information system (GIS) was used to comparatively analyze data on the incidence of Ixodes tick-borne borreliosis and tick-borne encephalitis in 89 administrative regions of the Russian Federation in the period 2000 to 2006. All baseline data were processed in the unified global system of geographic coordinates. The employment of GIS technologies to analyze statistics on infectious diseases allows rapid visualization and scaling of epidemiological data on any regions and areas therefore they may be recommended to organize an operative control of the natural foci of infectious diseases and a retrospective analysis of the information accumulated