Online Spatial HIV/AIDS Surveillance and Monitoring System for Nigeria

Abstract

HIV/AIDS has now become a big threat to the world generally, most especially the Sub-Saharan Africa region as it continues to increase drastically in the region. This disease has increased the poverty level of the countries in the region. In Nigeria, millions of people infected with this deadly disease are in their productive years between 15 and 49. This surge is having a negative effect on Nigeria and other Sub-Saharan Africa countries as it lowers life expectancy, slows population growth and social and economic effect on the country. Presently, health officers in Nigeria primarily rely on monitoring HIV/AIDS prevalence only among women attending antenatal clinics as that is the only source of getting data from HIV/AIDS patients. In the country, there is no electronic HIV/AIDS database, no electronic means of capturing HIV/AIDS data and no electronic monitoring of HIV/AIDS patients. This chapter presents a prototypical HIV/AIDS surveillance and monitoring system and the prototype was developed using Dreamweaver, PHP and MySQL. With this system, users could spatially query the pattern and distribution of any HIV/AIDS disease using any known location. Also, queries based on occupation, level of education, and gender among other things are possible with this system. Though the system was developed for Nigeria, it can also be extended to other countries within Sub-Saharan Africa region.