Identifying dengue fever risk zones in kolkata municipal corporation, West Bengal: A gis based study

Environmental and climatic parameters have significant association with vector-borne, waterborne, food-borne and air-borne disease through various means of transmission. Over last 20 years DF has become one of the most serious epidemic diseases in Kolkata. During 2005 and 2012, the number of dengue cases in Kolkata increased vividly by making top position in the state of West Bengal. Recently GIS technique and remote sensing data have been providing an alternative potential tool for vector borne diseases surveillance and control. In our present study, remote sensing imageries and GIS were used in identifying DF outbreak and distributional pattern. The main objective is to detect high risk areas for DF outbreak using remote sensing and related data sets in GIS environment. Many environmental parameters closely connected to DF incidence including Land use Land cover, Land Surface Temperature (LST), Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and population density were chosen for the present study. The weighted linear combination (WLC) was used based on selected environmental parameters for detecting distributional pattern of dengue outbreak. The results show that the major risk areas for dengue outbreak are connected with areas of high population density, low vegetation cover and high land surface temperatures (LST). Most of the DF risk areas are coming under the densely populated, residential and commercial areas which were located in non-vegetated areas with surrounding high values of land surface temperature.