Monday, November 2. 2009

ABC News Tackles CDC's Brown Map

ABC News did research and concluded exactly what the CDC notes on its nearly all brown (nearly all having reported "widespread" H1N1 Swine Flu activity) map: the map doesn't reveal severity. The article goes on to detail variance in severity across the country.

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

Wednesday, October 28. 2009

HuffPost on Bill Davenhall's TED MED Presentation

Alana B. Elias Kornfeld was at TED MED which started yesterday in San Diego. She gave ESRI's Health and Human Services Solutions Manager Bill Davenhall high praise for his presentation on the importance of geography in preventing, managing and understanding disease.

But the most compelling and immediately applicable information came from Bill Davenhall, .... Davenhall spoke about the missing piece to understanding personal health: the environment. He said the basic formula for good health is:
Genetics + lifestyle + environment = risks

Huffington Post

Tuesday, October 20. 2009

New Spatial Epidemiology Journal

Elsevier launched a new peer-reviewed scientific journal in September called Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology . It's a "forum for academics and scholars in the growing fields of graphical information systems [sic], epidemiology, exposure science, and spatial statistics."

- The Medical News

Wednesday, October 14. 2009

Spatial Thinking Decline May be Early Indicator of Alzheimers

Researchers from the University of Kansas published an article in the Archives of Neurology that suggests that “visuospatial” problems (trouble reading maps or building jigsaw puzzles) tend to appear about two or three years before memory loss. The study involved 444 people over the course of an average of six years; 134 developed Alzheimer’s.

- Telegraph

Tuesday, September 8. 2009

A Day to Celebrate John Snow

Wired reports on this day in tech in 1854. It's the day John Snow convinced authorities to remove the handle from the Broad Street pump and thus he invent modern epidemiology and spurred lots of health related GIS use.