Health

Saline County [MO] Assessor Margaret Pond said the assessor's office is six years behind on its mapping. E911 Director Stacie Smith and GIS Technician Brandon Wolfe provided a plan to unclog and update the system. Smith estimates the county will pay $11,632.50 for the system clean up. The...

The Bucks County Health Department [PA] said it has begun work on a GPS data collection system that would allow field specialists to mark the exact location of monitored septic systems and wells. And, that same technology could also some day be used to track everything from West Nile test...

Researchers have developed "a user-friendly Web-based GIS tool: the Vector-Borne Disease Airline Importation Risk Tool (VBD-AIR), to help better define the roles of airports and airlines in the transmission and spread of vector-borne diseases."  It uses spatial data buit on modeled global...

About 1.2 million people are currently blind as a result of the bacterial infection trachoma, according to the World Health Organization. Sightsavers, a charity based in Haywards Heath, West Sussex, is creating a "trachoma atlas" to reveal where the infection is most prevalent. Mapping...

QUT Associate Professor Robyn Clark measured access to cardiac care in Australia using GIS. “We looked at the distance to cardiac treatment centre locations in all of Australia’s 20,000 population centres,” Associate Professor Clark said. “By mapping the huge amounts of statistical data...

Andrew Curtis, University of Southern California associate professor of geography, is attempting to track devastation and health hazards in dilapidated areas. His ongoing research includes a focus on real-time GIS (geographic information systems) analysis of emerging infections. He used...

The folks at Bostonography provide an update on their efforts to crowdsource the neighborhoods of Boston. They offer a nice analysis of different levels of agreement in the about 300 responses to freely draw polygons on their interactive map. - Bostonography WAMU has teamed up with...

Is eating local the best way to sustain our planet? Is shipping produce from thousands of miles away better? Yes, says Pierre Desrochers, associate professor of geography, University of Toronto Mississauga. His book is “The Locavore’s Dilemma: In Praise of the 10,000 Mile Diet.” ...

A new feature on the Illinois Health Care Report Card is a Public Health Community Map. Mary Driscoll is chief of the department’s Division of Patient Safety and Quality. She says both consumers and health care professionals should find it useful as a companion to the state’s Health Care...

How important is accurate geocoding when doing disease studies? Pretty important per a study of historical data on a monkey pox outbreak in Africa. Less-careful georeferencing identified much smaller areas as having potential for monkeypox transmission in the Sahel region, as well as around...