Paper Title
Empowering Public Health Research & Outreach With Geospatial Technology: Cases From Three Continents

Abstract
Increasingly provision and research into public health is being empowered by application of geospatial technologies (GST). These technologies include geographic information systems (GIS), global positioning systems (GPS) and remote sensing. In this paper the authors examine three case studies of application of GST to public health in three different contexts in three different countries located on three different continents. The continents are Africa, Asia and North America and the respective countries are Ghana, Malaysia and the United States of America. The applications of GSTs are to common endemic diseases in those countries. The issues are Ghanaian malaria, Malaysian dengue fever and in breast cancer in the USA. In each case GIS was used to store, analyze and generate maps of the prevalence of these diseases in relation to spatially distributed physiographic, cultural and demographic factors. The data are used for research as well as in the case of the USA for public outreach via web maps. Keywords— Geospatial Technologies, Public Health, Ghana, Malaysia, USA, Malaria, Dengue Fever, Breast Cancer.