Development of a GIS-based platform and multimedia exposure model to map and analyze environmental inequalities
Résumé
The term 'exposome' emerged in an attempt to address the under appreciation of exposure sciences in the elucidation of the role of environmental stressors in many common chronic diseases. To respond to this concept, there is a need for a new way to analyze the environment-human health relationships. The use of GIS (Geographic Information System) as a platform for data storage, statistical analysis, and spatial interpolation remains an dramatic cornerstone to link data from different sources and supports databases to describe the global source-effect chain. GIS is a promising tool to analyze health data and putative covariates, such as environmental, exposure, or socio-economic factors. The objective of the PLAINE project is to develop a GIS-based platform combining environment and health information to map environmental disparities and detect vulnerable populations. This platform should permit the ongoing systematic collection, integration, and analysis of data regarding emission sources, environmental contamination, exposure to environmental hazards, population and health. To achieve this objective, combining exposure assessment and spatial data is a fundamental prerequisite that imply to first overcome different scientific limitations such as the linkage of the several databases to describe the global source-effect chain, the feasibility to integrate these data to the platform at a fine scale and the construction of interest variables and indicators by the development of spatial analysis and geostatistic tools combined to an exposure model