Health

A new study out of Toronto published online in the journal Diabetes Care inversely links walkable cities and diabetes. Researchers at St. Michael's Hospital and the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences examined data from more than one million residents of Toronto and concluded that...

When natural disasters strike, geospatial information technology can effectively support relief efforts. However, the impacts of these events could be minimized and considerable losses of life and property could be avoided with improved risk assessment, early warning and disaster monitoring. This...

The State Health Access and Data Assistance Center maps out the change in insurance rates, between 2011 and 2012. Only seven states saw a statistically significant decline in the uninsured rate. Two, New Hampshire and Colorado, actually saw their uninsured rates go up. - SHADAC via WaPo...

The U.S. Census Bureau has a new interactive online program that shows health insurance coverage as of 2010 for the nation's 3,140 counties. In general, an interactive map on the site, http://www.census.gov/did/www/sahie/index.html, shows that the South and West have a greater percentage...

The Documents that Changed the World podcast series is the brainchild of Joe Janes, a professor in the UW Information School. He uses the series to investigate the backstories and often evolving meaning of important historical documents, both famous and less known. ...This installment, however, was...

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...