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.

Sundosoft Brings GIS to Korea and other International GIS News

The Korea Times has a feature on Yoon Jay-joon (Jay Yoon), CEO of Sundosoft, a large GIS player in the country. One of the graphics is of a box of ArcGIS 9. I guess 10 is not yet out there.

- Korea Times

Panasonic's new GPS enabled cameras may not work quite right in China. How and exactly why is not clear, but apparently geotagging is illegal in that country.

- GPS Tracklog

Mackenzie District Council in New Zealand is fight against bad GIS data.

"During the last revaluation, it was discovered the information we sent to our valuers was incorrect. This was due to multiple users creating different copies of the data, manipulating the information and treating it as correct," Mr Morris said.

"If council chose to do nothing, the GIS information will get progressively worse.

But the local government does not want to put a dedicated outside person in charge of cleaning up the data. Instead, it's looking into a shared position.

- Stuff.co.nz

The Doolin Coast Guard team in Co Clare Ireland will be the only such unit in the country with a GIS. It'll be run on tablets to increase efficiency in response and planning.

The system also contains up to date information on the locations of caves, popular surfing spots and other areas where the team might be requested to respond to an incident.

It will also aid in incident planning as it contains information such as radio reception blackspots, access routes and helicopter landing sites.

- Clare Herald

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

Electronic Medical Records Implementations and other Health GIS News

Iwatch offers a map of "where states stand in distributing Medicaid incentive payments for adoption of health information technology."

- iWatch News

Sickweather, a start-up that’s attempting to forecast illness outbreaks by tracking Facebook and Twitter updates, says its method might have already worked.

That is, Sickweather noticed increased occurrences of the word “cough” near Algonquin, Ill., dating back to Oct. 5, about one month before whooping cough reports hit the local news. About a month later, the service recorded the same trends in Milwaukee, Wis., another area hit by whooping cough.

Now, that does not mean the company predicted the outbreaks, but does suggest it's on the right track.

- All Things D

The first All-Ireland Cancer Atlas is a collaborative publication by the Northern Ireland Cancer Registry at Queen's University Belfast and the National Cancer Registry in Cork. Among the findings: People in Northern Ireland face a greater risk of developing lung cancer than those living in the Republic of Ireland. But they are at lower risk of developing skin cancer. It's a PDF accessible via this intro page.

- BBC

NEH Grant to UCLA for Digital Humanities and other Education GIS News

UCLA landed three grants totaling $435,000, including $137,000 for a five-week seminar for college teachers on “the life, work and cultural milieu of Oscar Wilde” and $248,000 for a digital project that will investigate how recent mapping technologies such as GIS can be deployed in humanities research and teaching.

- LA Times Blog

Higher and further education schools in the UK and Ireland can continue to take advantage of the Chest agreement, a dicount program for software from Aug 1, 2011 until July 31, 2014. " It provides among other things, "Around 95% discount off of commercial prices for Esri ArcGIS software."\

- Eduserv via @michael_d_gould