**3. Conclusions**

As already discussed, over the past 30 years, prolific research studies demonstrating the potential opportunities offered by the use of remote sensing, GIS, and statistics in disease mapping and epidemiology had been undertaken. Most of such studies aimed to analyze and measure some of the presumed associations between environmental factors and human diseases. The results of the studies mentioned above had been used to guide the public health community during health intervention planning and decision-making. The studies had also been used to demonstrate the potential offered by remote sensing application to disease mapping and epidemiology and to support surveillance and control efforts. They have illustrated the diversity of potential remote sensing applications in disease surveillance and control programs. However, successful application of remote sensing technology depends on the ability of nonexperts' RS data and end users to access, retrieve, and analyze the data captured from satellites. The preprocessing steps involved before such data could be added as covariates into models also determine their uptake and usage by nonexperts. The ability to develop near real-time monitoring spatial models in order to timely predict the spatial and temporal patterns of vector-borne diseases, and transmission risk is also a motivation for the use of RS data in disease mapping and epidemiology.

Clearly, the dynamics of vector-borne diseases at any location are influenced by processes that operate at a variety of landscape and geographic scales. For instance, malaria transmission is a result of spatial interaction between hosts, vectors, and parasites. Remote sensing imagery involving both high and coarse resolutions when combined with GIS spatial analyses techniques could be used to support and guide existing vector surveillance and control programs at local, regional, and even continental scales. The findings of some the studies cited above had been used to illustrate and cement how remote sensing and GIS technologies can provide epidemiologists with a new perspective in as far as determining the environmental drivers of the diseases concerned. Researchers had been able to study the multiple factors influencing the patterns and distributions of vector-borne diseases at a variety of landscape and geographic scales. The exploration of some of the opportunities presented by remote sensing to disease mapping and epidemiology is still unfolding as new opportunities are being presented.
