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‘Global Origins and Dispersals’ addresses two key questions. First, how do epidemic diseases emerge and can their geographical origins be traced to any particular part of the world? Second, why do more infectious diseases appear to be emerging in recent decades and how far does this crudescence relate to the unprecedented changes in the global environment? The examination covers factors that, inter alia, have tended to increase the geographical scale of disease cycles, including the growth and relocation of the human population, globalization and the collapse of geographical space, and environmental changes associated with land use and climate change and variability. The origin and the spread of newly emerging infectious diseases are illustrated with reference to recent international epidemics of ‘bird flu’ associated with the avian influenza A (H5N1) virus, severe acute respiratory syndrome, and Ebola virus disease in West Africa (2013–16). more...

‘Epidemics in Small Communities’ develops an understanding of the ways in which an infection can achieve community circulation in small geographical areas. It begins by examining the local disease records of two doctors in general practice in the United Kingdom (William Pickles of Wensleydale and Edgar Hope-Simpson of Cirencester) to shed light on the processes whereby individual cases of diseases, such as measles and influenza, can develop into full-blown epidemics. The second half of the chapter focuses on Iceland as an island laboratory for the study of epidemic diffusion processes in the period 1902–1988. For this 87-year period, records of 131 discrete epidemic waves (with a recorded total of >0.5 million cases) of measles, influenza, and five other infectious diseases are examined in terms of wave spacing, wave velocity, and wave geography. These findings are related both to epidemiological theory and to aspects of the changing historical geography of the island. more...

A Geography of Infection explores the distinctive spatial patterns and processes by which infectious diseases spread from place to place and can grow from local and regional epidemics into global pandemics. The book focuses initially on the local scale of doctors’ practices and small islands where epidemic outbreaks are slight in the numbers infected and in geographical extent. Such local area studies raise two questions. First, how and where do epidemic diseases emerge and second, why do more diseases appear to be emerging now? To approach such questions implies a shift in spatial gear from painting epidemics with a fine-tipped local brush to an expanded palette on which doctors’ practices and small islands are replaced by regional and global populations. Simultaneously, time bands are extended backwards to the origins of civilization and forwards into the twenty-first century. It eventually leads to a consideration of global pandemics—both historical (e.g. plague, cholera, and influenza) and contemporary (HIV/AIDS and COVID-19)—and examines the ways the spread of infection can be prevented. more...

‘Epidemics as Diffusion Waves’ establishes the parameters of the book. It begins by defining the basic building blocks of the study: infection, contagion, and disease. Key epidemiological concepts and terms are introduced and defined, and classic compartmental (susceptible → infective → recovered; SIR) approaches to epidemic modelling are outlined. Epidemic waves in the time domain are examined in terms of their shape (logistic model, Kendall waves), as repetitive wave trains (Bartlett threshold model), and as branching networks (Reed–Frost model). The second half of the chapter examines epidemic waves in the space domain. The swash–backwash model of the single epidemic wave introduces the concept of the spatial basic reproduction number R0A, the geographical analogue of the basic reproduction number R 0. Spatial simulations of diffusion waves are explored through the work of Torsten Hägerstrand. The chapter concludes with a consideration of dyadic (lag correlation and spatial interaction) approaches to epidemic modelling. more...

‘Infectious Disease Control’ examines the historical development of approaches to the geographical control, elimination, and eradication of infectious diseases. It begins at a local spatial scale, seven centuries ago, among the plague-ridden lazarettos of Venice. It ends at the global scale with twenty-first-century developments in the Internet-based monitoring and surveillance of infectious diseases. Basic spatial strategies for the control of infectious diseases (defensive isolation and offensive containment) are outlined, their historical development and application in the form of such measures as cordons sanitaires, isolation, and quarantine are reviewed, and their present-day forms highlighted. Vaccines and vaccination are reviewed as a second approach to disease control, alongside initiatives for the global eradication of infectious diseases such as smallpox and poliomyelitis. Disease surveillance continues to form a cornerstone of spatially focused control activities and, so, the chapter ends with a review of the evolution of disease intelligence systems down the centuries. more...

‘Pandemics, II: COVID-19’ explores the spatial and temporal patterns of infection, illness, and death due to the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the causative agent of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). It covers the period from the putative beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in late 2019 to the turn of 2021. Consecutive sections review the basic epidemiological properties of the virus and the disease, the pattern of global dispersal, and the resulting patterns of reported disease activity in the United Kingdom and the United States. The swash–backwash model is used to analyse the spatial spread of the first wave of COVID-19 in England and to estimate the spatial velocity of wave expansion and retreat, January–June 2020. Approaches to the short- and longer-term forecasting of COVID-19 are illustrated with reference to sample states of the United States. more...

This chapter suggests that scale obtrudes into geographical research in three main ways: in the problem of covering the earth’s surface; in the problem of linking results obtained at one scale to those obtained at another; and in standardizing information that is available only on a mixed series of scales. One of the characteristic features of geographical research is its concern with a particular scale of reality. The scale coverage problem is simple and immediate. There is an important difference between the attempts to use sampling to circumvent the scale problem, and the way in which sampling is being used in research. This essential difference is between purposive and probability sampling. Every change in scale will bring about the statement of a new problem, and there is no basis for assuming that associations existing at one scale will also exist at another’. more...

By the late 1960s powerful push and pull elements were forcing a small but increasing proportion of geographers to move their energies towards the forecasting arena. Within the spatial tradition, locational analysis was running into something of an impasse. Most of the classical forecasting studies fall within the first spatial case. Thus national forecasts of future population levels and future economic activity tend to be conducted in terms of past sets of values for the nation itself. Under the advocacy of Commoner, the Ehrlichs, Earth Days, Royal Commissions, and the like, geographers were being forced to put static ecological models forward in a market-place that clamoured for the dynamic; the emphasis was on using such models to predict likely directions and rates of environmental change. Over shorter forecast periods, geographers are being drawn into national, regional, and local projections as part of planning exercises. more...

It is now a half-century since the ‘new geography‘ summer schools for teachers were held at Madingley Hall near Cambridge. Here, this ‘experiment’ in school-university linkage is recalled by one of... more...