MESA
About
Spatial Epi LLC is a one-person practice building software for spatial and computational epidemiology. Its first project is MESA, an offline spatial-analysis environment for public health.
The practice
Spatial Epi LLC is a single-founder Colorado company. It develops and maintains MESA and carries out spatial and computational epidemiology work. Its focus is the setting MESA was built for: small health departments and rural jurisdictions that often lack a GIS department, a software budget, or dedicated IT, and whose analytic tooling should not assume a university or state health department behind it.
MESA
MESA (Mapping Epidemiology for Sparse Areas) takes messy exported health data through cleaning, geocoding, spatial cluster detection, and the decision about which counts are safe to publish, entirely on one machine with nothing leaving it. Each step is a node on a saved pipeline, so the analysis can be re-run and the run itself is recorded. The spatial statistics are cross-checked against the field's reference implementations, the geocoder is validated on held-out authoritative data, and every run reproduces bit-for-bit across platforms. It is a single-author, pre-release project.
Sparse areas are the hard case, and they are the reason for two of the features. A rural county's case counts are small enough that a published table can identify someone, so MESA masks the small cells and a second cell as cover, then reports whether anything is still recoverable. Small counts also make unstable rates: one case in a settlement of forty people is a rate of 2,500 per 100,000 and almost no evidence, so MESA can pull each rate toward the district mean by an amount set by how little that population can support.
The methods pages document how each part works and what it is checked against. The notes cover the why and the how-it-went. Packaged downloads are on the home page as they land.
Who builds it
MESA is designed and built by Ross Wardrup, an MPH Epidemiology candidate at the University of Memphis, with a background in geospatial software and public-health surveillance and an epidemiology practicum at the Southeast Utah Health Department. He is an author on peer-reviewed and preprint epidemiologic research, and is writing a master's thesis on spatiotemporal modeling of West Nile virus surveillance in California.
Contact
Questions, corrections, and requests to use MESA are welcome at ross@spatialepi.org. For anything support-related, support@spatialepi.org reaches the same place for now.