Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
WHO is willing to assist any endemic country in order to perform this district analysis. Simple guidelines will be made available and short training courses conducted at a national level, where required. The structure of the standard database Databases can be maintained by national programmes manually, in the form of simple typed lists , or be fully automated, with the added benefits of speed and accuracy that a computer can bestow. For those national programmes with access to computer facilities, WHO/LEP is prepared to distribute the database in various formats so that the programmes can adapt it to their own existing systems. The most common formats are: dBase, FoxBASE, FoxPro, Visual FoxPro, Access, Excel, Lotus 123, Epi-Info and ASCII. The structure of the current WHO standard database is provided overleaf, with examples of the data it can contain.
The database already contains a considerable amount of data compiled from a number of heterogeneous sources. Most of the geographic and demographic information was provided by the United Nations Environment Programme/Global Resource Information Database (UNEP/GRID), and the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). Detailed information at the national and sub-national level was collated from many sources, including reports from governments, national leprosy programme managers, WHO consultants, UNICEF, the National Centre for Geographical Information and Analysis (NCGIA) and geographic names maintained by affiliates of the US Defense Mapping Agency. Because names of various location were compiled from a wide variety of sources, a country's official documents may have used different names and/or spellings to those contained within the current WHO database.