Territories and Health in Transition: Remote Sensing and New Landscapes in Pathological Complexes associated with Infectious and Neglected Tropical Diseases

The emergence of a new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, detected on 31 December 2019, opened the door to COVID-19 illness on a global scale, leading the WHO, in March 2020, to decree a pandemic. While the virus reinforces the idea of an invisible, microscopic reality, the disease has revealed layers of macroscopic invisibilities: socio-territorial manifestations of the COVID-19 pandemic. The illness, produced by social, economic, ecological interdependencies and individual and collective asymmetries, showed the complexity of the pandemic and the difficulties for its control in different territories. In the theoretical field, the concept of Pathogenic Complex introduced in 1933, by the French geographer Max Sorre, already accounted for this completeness of the problem. In the technical field, however, the opportunities for innovation, in the field of remote sensing and integrated spatial analysis, in methods and tools capable of revealing macroscopic interdependencies and asymmetries continue to challenge us. This session presents a panel of recent interinstitutional, collaborative, interdisciplinary and situated projects, with levels of public engagement, in which groups/communities of Brazilians, South Americans, Europeans, Africans and North Americans are involved, who have accepted to face dimensions of this contemporary challenge.