The Information System Of Tuberculosis Management Based On GIS Technique

Tuberculosis(TB)is one of the main diseases that threatens people's health and their lives. In 1993, the World Health Organization (WHO) took an unprecedented step and declared tuberculosis a global emergency. According to WHO, TB killed 3 million people in 1995,and it is estimated that 30 million people could die from TB in the next 10 years, and about 8 -10 million people will be newly infected if control is not further strengthened. TB has become the leading infectious killer of youth and adults.The epidemic of TB in our country -- China is more serious; China is one of the 22 high-burden countries (HBC) of tuberculosis in the world. The number of TB cases is only smaller than that of India. According to the forth epidemic survey in china on tuberculosis in 2000, 400 million people are infected with the TB bacillus, 5 million people are active, about 2 million are contagious, and 150 thousand people die from TB each year. So, the epidemic of TB in china is becoming more dangerous and serious which is an important factor to cause poorness or poverty in rural areas. It is a veryimportant issue for TB control workers, especially for decision-makers, to master TB from their time, their spatial and their epidemic. Geographic information system (GIS) just is able to work together with the spatial data and the attribute data of TB, track its spread and display the outcomes of complicated raw data, as well as their analysis, by visual map and image, etc. Thus, the decision-makers could master the epidemic of TB dynamically and then could take better measures to control TB.In this study, the attribute data of newly infected TB (enrolled) in 2000 of Qianjiang County have been surveyed, collected, sorted and inputted; the basic spatial data also have been collected, digitalized and extracted by layers. They are basic and experience for us to continue our study.This study uses MapObjects control (Evaluation Version) of Environmental Systems Research Institute(ESRI) and Visual basic 6.0 to develop the information system of tuberculosis management. The system is able to manage the spatial and attribute data at the same time, query information using SQL; and zoom in, zoom out, pan the layers; and is able to display raw data, do some analysis, as well as manage report, and so on. Yet, some functions of the system are under exploiting or considering.This paper mainly discusses how to use GIS technique on TB management, and also discusses the methods and the steps of building the information system of TB management.