• Journal of the Economic Geographical Society of Korea
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.155-168
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• 2023

Health geography has gained importance due to healthy smart cities, regions, and the integration of geo-internet and blockchain technologies. This study explores the intersection of geography and health, focusing on specific health challenges faced by individuals and groups. Using observational and descriptive methods, the study takes a regional approach to illuminate the socio-economic factors that are critical to addressing global health challenges. Drawing on academic literature and practical research, a concise case study of health challenges in Uzbekistan is presented, offering valuable insights. The analysis of data from informative articles and UN publications highlights the interdisciplinary nature of health geography and its practical applicability for researchers and policymakers. The findings underscore the important role of geography and health sciences in addressing region-specific diseases while highlighting the importance of spatial analysis in understanding environmental hazards and health impacts, including disease outbreaks.

• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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• v.48 no.2
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• pp.218-238
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• 2013

The objective of my paper is to investigate historical change in concepts of medical geography and to present its historical vision. Modern medical geography was established in the name of medical topography in Europe where it had to control tropical diseases in the course of exploration and voyages for colonial interests. England developed medical geography in the name of sanitary reform, France did so for civilizing mission, and geomedicine prevailed in Germany. The twentieth century witnessed two traditions of medical geography, with focus on disease ecology and medical care system, respectively. In addition, the paper emphasizes the significance of cartography of disease as knowledge as power. As the identity of place becomes increasingly important in relation to health at the around of the twenty-first century, geography of health has emerged as a new promising discipline independently of medical and public health geography.

• Safety and Health at Work
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.296-303
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• 2021

Background: Rapid population aging in developed countries has resulted in the working-age population increasingly being tasked with the provision of informal care. Methods: An educational intervention was delivered to 21 carer-employees employed at a Canadian University. Work role function, job security, schedule control, work-family conflict, familywork conflict, and supervisor and coworker support were measured as part of an aggregated workplace experience score. This score was used to measure changes pre/post intervention and at a follow-up period approximately 12 months post intervention. Three random intercept models were created via linear mixed modeling to illustrate changes in participants' workplace experience across time. Results: All three models reported statistically significant random and fixed effects intercepts, with a positive coefficient of change. Conclusion: This suggests that the intervention demonstrated an improvement of the workplace experience score for participants over time, with the association particularly strong immediately after intervention.

• Proceedings of the Korean Environmental Health Society Conference
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• 2001.11a
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• pp.1.2-9
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• 2001

• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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• v.47 no.5
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• pp.677-699
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• 2012

Climate changes may cause substantial changes in spatial patterns and distribution of vector-borne diseases (VBD's), which will result in a significant threat to humans and emerge as an important public health problem that the international society needs to solve. As global warming becomes widespread and the Korean peninsula characterizes subtropical climate, the potentials of climate-driven disease outbreaks and spread rapidly increase with changes in land use, population distributions, and ecological environments. Vector-borne diseases are typically infected by insects such as mosquitoes and ticks, and infected hosts and vectors increased dramatically as the habitat ranges of the VBD agents have been expanded for the past 20 years. Medical geography integrates and processes a wide range of public health data and indicators at both local and regional levels, and ultimately helps researchers identify spatiotemporal mechanism of the diseases determining interactions and relationships between spatial and non-spatial data. Spatial epidemiology is a new and emerging area of medical geography integrating geospatial sciences, environmental sciences, and epidemiology to further uncover human health-environment relationships. An introduction of GIS-based disease monitoring system to the public health surveillance system is among the important future research agenda that medical geography can significantly contribute to. Particularly, real-time monitoring methods, early-warning systems, and spatial forecasting of VBD factors will be key research fields to understand the dynamics of VBD's.

• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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• v.31 no.2
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• pp.329-345
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• 1996

The purposes of this study are to review research trends of applied geography field, to retrospect geographical works done by Korean geographers in applied geography, and to prospect the future of applied geography. We are in the period where societal problems such as energy, transportation, pollution, environment, health care, and many others, require careful consideration and need throughout strategies for solution. Most societal problems have some geographical dimensions. Because these problems are geographic in nature, there is an obvious implication that geography as a discipline has something to offer in their solutions. In fact, most geographic problems are best presented and analyzed through the applications of geographic theories, concepts and tools. Applied geography is a branch of general geography. It relies on the scientific methods and uses the principles and methods of pure geography. However applied geography is different in that it analyzes and evaluates real world action and planning and seeks to implement and manipulate environmental and spatial realities. Thus, geographic theories and other social theories that have geographic dimensions are fundamental to applied geography. Applied geography has a short history as theme in Korean geography. During the last two decades. Korea achieved remarkable economic growth. We have also encountered widening regional disparity, housing shortage of larger cities, transportation congestion, environmental pollution and many other problems. Applied geographers have tried to analyze and solve such spatial problems during the last 30 years. The research trend of Korean applied geography can be subdivided into 5 categories: (1) land use analysis and efficient utilization, (2) national physical development and planning. (3) regional development and regional planning, (4) tourism and location-allocation, transportation planning. Still the overconcentration of Seoul metropolitan region and unbalanced regional development are perceived to be the serious spatial problems which may induce more works to solve these problems. In Korea new emphasis has to be given to some professional training and experimental learning, including methodology, field techniques data management, statistical analysis, cartography, GIS, and other tools, as applicable and beneficial to problem solving in real world. The growth of applied geography depends on new insights and purposed solutions of future applied geographers in Korea. Applied geographers will contribute to the creation of future Korean geographies.

• Environmental Analysis Health and Toxicology
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• v.30
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• pp.10.1-10.14
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• 2015

Recent cohort studies have relied on exposure prediction models to estimate individual-level air pollution concentrations because individual air pollution measurements are not available for cohort locations. For such prediction models, geographic variables related to pollution sources are important inputs. We demonstrated the computation process of geographic variables mostly recorded in 2010 at regulatory air pollution monitoring sites in South Korea. On the basis of previous studies, we finalized a list of 313 geographic variables related to air pollution sources in eight categories including traffic, demographic characteristics, land use, transportation facilities, physical geography, emissions, vegetation, and altitude. We then obtained data from different sources such as the Statistics Geographic Information Service and Korean Transport Database. After integrating all available data to a single database by matching coordinate systems and converting non-spatial data to spatial data, we computed geographic variables at 294 regulatory monitoring sites in South Korea. The data integration and variable computation were performed by using ArcGIS version 10.2 (ESRI Inc., Redlands, CA, USA). For traffic, we computed the distances to the nearest roads and the sums of road lengths within different sizes of circular buffers. In addition, we calculated the numbers of residents, households, housing buildings, companies, and employees within the buffers. The percentages of areas for different types of land use compared to total areas were calculated within the buffers. For transportation facilities and physical geography, we computed the distances to the closest public transportation depots and the boundary lines. The vegetation index and altitude were estimated at a given location by using satellite data. The summary statistics of geographic variables in Seoul across monitoring sites showed different patterns between urban background and urban roadside sites. This study provided practical knowledge on the computation process of geographic variables in South Korea, which will improve air pollution prediction models and contribute to subsequent health analyses.

• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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• v.47 no.5
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• pp.735-754
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• 2012

Korean society in the 2000 has experienced new many social and spatial issues such as the process of neoliberalism and changes in urban and spatial policies, the development of information and communication technology and reconfiguration of informational social space, radically increasing foreign immigrants and transformation to multicultural society, global warming and environmental injustice, and these new issues have promoted development of social geography in Korea. In addition to a review on them, this paper provides a review on empirical researches on traditional issues which have been dealt with in social geography in the 2000 in Korea. Even though there have been numerous sub-issues, they can be divided into two categories: one is urban and communal social geography including urban housing and residential segregation, urban social problems such as poverty, crime, education, health care, social welfare, urban and rural community building, identity, sense of place, and social movement; the other is social geography of population and migration, including population movement, aged society and social welfare for elderly people, and foreign immigrants and formation of multicultural social space. As some difficult conditions such as path-dependent process of neoliberalism, transformation toward informational, aged, and multicultural society would continue, so social geography in Korea to tackle with these external conditions should deepen its theoretical insights and widen its research issues.

• Journal of dental hygiene science
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.174-181
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• 2013

The objective of this research is to compare and analyze regional accessibility of Korean primary school students to oral health services from the perspective of public health geography by using geographic information system in which the choropleth map has been regarded as the most popular method. Statistical proximity on the basis of calculus of 205 regions-based school oral health data is optimized to set five class intervals for five maps. These choropleth maps of oral heal programs such as oral health education, tooth-brushing method education, preventive dental care and curative dental care, demonstrate that there exist wide regional discrepancies throughout the country in terms of primary school students' accessibility to oral health services within the programs. The paper not just contributes to overcoming the existing paradigm by actively considering an interdisciplinary research among public health dentistry, dental hygiene and geography of public health, but provides clear evidence for national oral health policy in South Korea.

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.16 no.17
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• pp.7737-7742
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• 2015

Background: Cancer is one of the common causes of disability and mortality in the world. The present study aimed to define the spatiotemporal distribution of gastrointestinal tract cancers using a geographic information system (GIS) over the time period of 2007-2012 in Kermanshah-Iran. Materials and Methods: The method of studying was descriptive-analytical as well as comparative with gastrointestinal tract cancer patients based in the City of Kermanshah over the time period covered. For data analysis, the GIS and SPSS 16.0 were applied. Results: According to the pathological reports within the space of 5 years, 283 cases of gastrointestinal tract cancer (157 in males, 156 in females) were reported. The performed tests in terms of spatial distribution in the environment of GIS indicated that the disease demonstrated a clustered pattern in the City of Kermanshah. More to the point, some loci of this disease have emerged in the City of Kermanshah that in the first level, 6 neighborhoods with 29-59 cases of this disease per square kilometer and in the second level, 15-29 cases. Conclusions: Gastrointestinal tract cancer demonstrated an ascending trend within the space of 5 years of research and the spatiotemporal distribution of cancer featured a concentrated and clustered pattern in the City of Kermanshah.