|
|
|
|
|
|
|
by Peter Hambly
The Rapid Inquiry Facility (RIF) is an application that supports two types of environmental health activities: disease mapping studies and risk analysis studies. It was designed to help epidemiologists and public health researchers to rapidly investigate potential environmental hazards, especially those related to industrial sites. The tool uses health, environmental, socio-economic, population and geographic data to calculate risks in relation to sources of exposure and to generate maps.
Disease mapping studies are used to visualise mortality or morbidity rates and risks across an area. They are used to explore spatial patterns of health outcomes; identify potential issues regarding data quality by geographical area; and identify areas which need additional study.
Risk analysis studies are used to provide an initial investigation into whether a suspected source of some particular exposure is having an impact on health in a local population. The tool can generate standardised rates and relative risks for a set of health outcomes. The RIF allows for full flexibility in the selection of a range of ages; a time frame specifying an era for data set collections; and a geographic area.
The software application was originally developed in the late 1990s by SAHSU staff. The most widely used RIF distribution (version 3.x) an embedded plug-in for ArcGIS 9.x has been employed by many institution and public health practitioners around the world to both automatically generate disease maps and asses disease risk in proximity to known source of pollution.
Screenshot of the RIF 3.x, an embedded plug-in for ArcGIS 9
This software was developed as part of the EUROHEIS and EUROHEIS2, funded by the European Commission’s Directorate for General Health and Consumer Protection. It also received funding from the US Center for Disease Control (CDC) as part of the [US] Environment and Health Public Tracking Program.