Sistemas de Información Geográfica en Salud Pública: su aplicación al programa de vigilancia y control de la legionelosis

This experience has been developed by the Public Health Institute of the Community of Madrid in order to use the GIS tools in the Legionnaires’ disease prevention programme and specifically in three work areas: epidemiologic surveillance, cooling towers environmental control and plans of intervention in case of an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease. After having considered different strategies with their advantages the selected model have been the use of map viewers in the intranet with a different configuration format depending on its goals: images map viewers for systematic non-outbreak cases and cooling towers surveillance, viewers that allow an easier and usual consultation and, in the other hand, layers map viewers, better adapted to more complex users’ necessities and so designed to work in emergency situations. Both models are implemented to decentralise the use of these indispensable tools and make them closer of the public health professionals. Some methodological proposals to study spatial association of Legionaires’disease outbreaks are also presented and discussed in this paper.