Summary
Spatial statistics have broadly been applied, developed and demanded from the field of epidemiology. The point process theory is an appropriate framework to analyse the spatial variation of risk of disease from information at individual level.
We illustrate an application of point pattern tools to study a few legionnaire’s disease outbreaks. Specifically, these techniques are applied to explore the geographical distribution of cases resulting from three legionnaire’s disease outbreaks that occurred successively in Alcoi, a city placed in the East of Spain.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
F.E. Alexander and P. Boyle (Editors). Methods for Investigating Localized Clustering of Disease. International Agency for Cancer Research, Lyon, 1996.
R.S. Bhopal, P.J. Diggle and B. Rowlingson. Pinpointing clusters of apparently sporadic cases of legionnaires’ disease. British Medical Journal, 304:1022–1027, 1992.
R.S. Bhopal, R.J. Fallon, E.C. Buist, R.J. Black and J.D. Urquhart. Proximity of the home to a cooling tower and risk of non-outbreak Legionnaire’s Disease. British Medical Journal, 302:378–383, 1991.
C.M. Brown, P.J. Nuorti, R.F. Breiman, A.L. Hathcock, B.S. Fields, H.B. Lipman, G.C. Llewellyn, J. Hoffman and M. Cetron. A community outbreak of legionnaire’s disease linked to hospital cooling towers: an epidemiological methos to calculate dose of exposure. International Journal of epidemiology, 28:353–359, 1999.
A.G. Chetwynd, P.J. Diggle, A. Marshall and R. Parslow. Investigations of spatial clustering from individually matched case-control studies. Biostatistics, 2:277–293, 2001.
P.J. Diggle. A kernel method for smoothing point process data. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society C, 34:138–147, 1985.
P.J. Diggle. A point process modelling approach to raised incidence of a rare phenomenon in the vicinity of a prespecified point. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society A, 153:349–362, 1990.
P.J. Diggle. Point process modelling in environmental epidemiology. In: V. Barnett and K. Turkman (eds.) Statistics for the Environment. Wiley, New York, 1993.
P.J. Diggle and A. Chetwynd. Second-order analysis of spatial clustering for inhomogeneous populations. Biometrics, 47:1155–1163, 1991.
P.J. Diggle and P. Elliot. Disease risk near point sources: statistical issues in the analysis of disease risk near point sources using individual or spatially aggregated data. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 49:20–27, 1995.
P.J. Diggle and B. Rowlingson. A conditional approach to point process modelling of elevated risk. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society A, 157:433–440, 1994.
P. Elliot, J.C. Wakefield, N.G. Best and D.J. Briggs (Editors). Spatial Epidemiology: Methods and Applications. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000.
J.E. Kelsall and P.J. Diggle. Spatial variation in risk of disease: a nonparametric binary regression approach. Applied Statistics, 47:559–573, 1998.
J.M. Last. A Dictionary of Epidemiology. Oxford University Press, New York, 1995.
A.B. Lawson. Statistical Methods in Spatial Epidemiology. Wiley, Chichester, 2001.
A. Lawson, A. Biggeri, D. Böhning, E. Lesaffre, J.F. Viel and R. Bertollini (Editors). Disease Mapping and Risk Assessment for Public Health. Wiley, Chichester, 1999.
B.D. Ripley. Spatial Statistics. Wiley, New York, 1981.
B. Rowlingson and P.J. Diggle. Splancs: Spatial Point Pattern Analysis Code in S-Plus. Technical Report, Lancaster University, Lacanster, U.K., 1993.
B.W. Silverman. Density Estimation for Statistics and Data Analysis. Chapman and Hall, London, 1986.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2006 Springer Science+Business Media Inc.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Martínez-Beneito, M.A. et al. (2006). Source Detection in an Outbreak of Legionnaire’s Disease. In: Baddeley, A., Gregori, P., Mateu, J., Stoica, R., Stoyan, D. (eds) Case Studies in Spatial Point Process Modeling. Lecture Notes in Statistics, vol 185. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-31144-0_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-31144-0_9
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-0-387-28311-1
Online ISBN: 978-0-387-31144-9
eBook Packages: Mathematics and StatisticsMathematics and Statistics (R0)