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Space Technology Comes in Handy to Tackle Humanitarian Crises WHO
February 11, 2008 at 12:10 PM
News on IT in Healthcare
When former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan was seen leaving a conference in Geneva in November 2005 clutching maps of the south Asia earthquake disaster, it was evidence that satellites as a key weapon in humanitarian emergencies had arrived, notes an article in the February issue of the WHO bulletin.
In the hours and days after the October 8 quake struck killing more than 73 000 people and injuring some 150 000, experts from France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United Nations scrambled to gather and interpret images data from satellites to assist rescue workers on the ground from local authorities to nongovernmental organizations (NGO), like Télécoms Sans Frontičres.
Satellites are used to obtain images of a disaster zone quickly, so that rescue workers can focus their efforts where they are needed. But there are other uses of satellites: as a way to predict and monitor the spread of communicable diseases; as a simple means of communication when land-based systems have failed; and as location and navigation aids when Global Positioning System GPS units locate and track public health information. In the outbreak of Rift Valley fever in Kenya (20062007), for example, GPS units were used to link surveys to an actual place on the earth, according to Carl Kinkade, enterprise Geographic Information System (GIS) coordinator for the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
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