Wednesday, November 18. 2009

FDA Grants 62K to Wisconsin for TIGER Agro-terrorism Tool

TIGER stands for Terrorist Incident GIS-Enhanced Response. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave the grant (one of four) to Food Safety Division, housed in the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection, to encourage new ways to protect the nation’s food system from agro-terrorism. The team "will develop a computer program using licensing and inspection information to develop computer maps that track where contaminated food may have been distributed."

- WisBusiness.com

Monday, November 16. 2009

Health and Science Tidbits

New maps are pinpointing both the location of those with HIV along with "how sick they are" based on viral load. Those maps, are in turn, helping to better site clinics in the Bay Area. It turns out that the areas with the greatest number of cases may not be the sickest. And, the sickest may be in lower income or other under-served areas.

- New York Times

Two German shorthaired pointers are helping rangers track birds including black grouse at Perthshire's Schiehallion estate in the UK. The dogs track the birds, and GPS tracks the dogs. Then, when a bird is found and flushed out, the ranger identifies the species.

- BBC

Advances in Malaria Research: In the Lab and the Field was held last week online, though its based out of Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute. Among the papers (slides, pdf) was one from Gregory Glass, professor of molecular microbiology and immunology which discussed using GIS and satellite imagery to pinpoint locations at risk.

- Tonic

Wednesday, November 11. 2009

Google Maps Flu Vaccine Provider App

I'm not sure why this is so exciting, but Google created a My Maps app that offers locations and times for accessing seasonal and H1N1 Swine Flu vaccines. ReadWriteWeb is very excited:

The application gives vaccine location hours, when available, and even lets users know when vaccine supplies have run out at a particular location.

Data sources?

Project managers Roni Zeiger, M.D., and Jennifer Haroon wrote on the official Google blog, "Especially given slower than expected vaccine production, we think it's important to bring together flu shot information in a coherent manner. We've been working with HHS, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and state and local health agencies to gather information on flu vaccine locations across the country, particularly for the H1N1 flu vaccine (both the nasal-spray vaccine and the shot)."

Now, Google has gathered information about locations of flu vaccine shots from 20 states in the U.S. Google is also collecting information from chain pharmacies and other vaccine providers in all 50 states. Currently, users can find vaccine shots available from retail chains such as Walgreen's, CVS, Kmart, and WinnDixie.

In my local search each Walgreens came up twice. Also, there is no information on the source of the data. I'd err on the side of sourcing and visit my state's public health website.

- ReadWriteWeb

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