World Malaria Day and other Health GIS News

April 25 is World Malaria Day. What' new?

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has a new initiative in combating malaria called ‘T3: Test, Treat, Track’, which urges malaria-endemic countries and donors to “move towards universal access to diagnostic testing and antimalarial treatment, and to build robust malaria surveillance systems.”

Surveillance via tracking and mapping should mean more use of GIS to fight the disease.

- Africa Business Review

Not news to me, but I guess someone had to write it down:

The developed application shows that by using solely Open Source software it was possible to develop a customisable web based GIS application that provides functions necessary to convey health and environmental data to experts and non-experts alike without the requirement of proprietary software.

- International Journal of Health Geographics

Ireland is looking for contractor for its online health atlas.

Comparing Maps of Obesity and Car Travel and other Health GIS News

Here, we examine visually, through a series of maps, the association between obesity, diabetes, and sedentary transportation.

The maps are striking, but Anne Price and Ariel Godwin conclude:

... the relationship between sedentary travel and health outcomes can be misleading when additional contributing factors are not taken into account. While it is not our intent to claim a direct causal link between transportation modes and obesity rates, it is hard to deny the existence of some geographic patterns.

- Planetizen

Health Canada is drafting national guidelines for electricity-generating wind turbines that will establish a recommended minimum safe distance between the structures and homes. ...The Health Canada guidelines will deal with noise and shadow flicker, and will account for the power of the turbine, the size of the blade and local geography, [Dr. Moira] McKinnon [Saskatchewan's chief medical health office] said.

No doubt they'll need ot use GIS, once they figure out the details to manage noise and other impacts.

- The Phoenix Star

The [second edition of the online] British Columbia Atlas of Wellness shows that northerners are more likely to smoke, eat unhealthy food and die sooner than their counterparts in Vancouver and Victoria.

- Times Colonist

Earlier this week, the Missouri Hospital Association launched www.MissouriHealthMatters.com. I recommend checking it out. The site contains quality of care and patient satisfaction data filtered through GIS technology with hospital specific information in a dashboard format. My thanks to David Dillon, MHA's VP of media relations, for giving me the heads-up on the website. I can attest to David's observation that the reports contain the same data as reported to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, "however the interface is much more user-friendly and locally-focused."

It uses ArcGIS Explorer Onilne, which took a while to load on my machine.

- Columbia Tribune

A RESEARCH OBSERVATORY based at NUI Maynooth [Kildare, Ireland] have unveiled a new online mapping tool that aims to show exactly how some parts of Ireland are covered by hospitals or schools.

The accessibility map, produced by the All-Island Research Observatory, highlights areas based on their proximity to facilities like hospitals, primary schools and secondary schools.

The map helps show diparities in services.

- The Journal.IE

Health GIS Tidbits - 4/21/11

Dr Van Sickle left CDC and founded a company, Asthmapolis, which is based in Madison, Wisconsin. The result is Spiroscout, an inhaler with a built-in Global Positioning System locator and (in advanced models) a wireless link to the internet.

It's not the first such inhaler, but it's far smaller than past versions and it has at least two benefits: indications for individuals about their own use and crowdsourced data (stripped of identifying details) for a broader look at usage patterns.

- The Economist

Environmental access to PA [physical activity] resources (determined via GIS-based assessment of the number of gyms, schools, trails, parks and athletic fields within 0.5 miles of each participant's home) moderated the association between social support and PA; among adolescents with high levels of environmental resources, greater social support was associated with students participating in a greater number of sports in school, whereas no such relationship emerged among adolescents with low environmental resources. 

International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity 2011, 8:34 via 7th Space

The authors, Richard Layte of the ESRI  [Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI), Dublin, Ireland] and colleagues, say the results showed that as the distance to the nearest supermarket increased, it was accompanied by a small but significant decrease in the healthiness of a person's diet.

This is the first time that this link has been established in research outside the US, where healthy 'food deserts' have been found in areas of social deprivation.

- Irish Heatlh