Monday, November 2. 2009

Health and Science Tidbits

New regulations are being proposed to help respond to lead poising in the state of New Jersey, but GIS is in use, too.

DCA [Department of Community Affairs]and DHSS [Department of Health and Senior Services] have created Geographic Information System (GIS) maps that identify where children with elevated blood lead levels live, where there is older housing stock, and neighborhoods where children are not screened. This information allows cities and community-based organizations to target the most at-risk children with their education, outreach, and prevention efforts.

- New Jersey Newsroom

In the U.S. the big issue related to H1N1 flu shots is simply having enough vaccine. In the York region of Ontario, the issue is where the clinics are. People in Markham are being asked to drive 45 minutes to the nearest clinic. But, the locations were determined based on the locations of vulnerable populations, using GIS.

According to Dr. Karim Kurji, medical officer of health for York Region, the locations of the clinics were determined based on some geographic information system (GIS) mapping to find the highest number of priority population such as health care workers, pregnant women and people under age 65 with chronic health conditions.

Dr. Kurgi said the plan is to have one small and four big clinics for the region, including the ones in Vaughan, Newmarket and Georgina (small).

- The Liberal

An article with research from many universities and studies about how the brain makes sense of large scale location challenges includes this suggestion that we use something like "image pyramids" in our brains:

"The maps are stored as extremely thin cards in a deck in the hippocampus, the area that is regarded as the brain's memory focal point," he [Edvard Moser, a leading expert on brain mapping at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology] said. "The deck is sorted by rank, so that the fine-grained detail maps are located at the top, with the biggest, most coarsely drawn maps further down in the deck."

- Kansas City Star