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Medical Research

Interactive Map of US County Public Health Statistics

Submitted by jim on Sun, 2010-02-21 18:35

screenshot of County Health Rankings siteA new website called County Health Rankings analyzes public health statistics for each county in the US, creating state-by-state reports of the healthiest counties.  The website, a joint project of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute, analyzes healh factors (statistics about disease incidence, tobacco use, etc.) and health outcomes (such as life expectancy) to create county-by-county rankings of each state.  These rankings are then mapped for each state, using Flash-based Fusion Maps software (not free/open source) so that users can drill down to access county-level data.

National Cancer Institute's Cancer Mortality Map Generator

This is a very useful interface allowing visitors to visualize all U.S. records of cancer deaths over a 50-year period.  Epidemiologists and others can drill down to the county level, selecting from dozens of different types of cancer.  Data can be output in a variety of formats, including static image for copying and interactive Flash maps.

URL: 
http://cancercontrolplanet.cancer.gov/atlas/index.jsp

Cancer Mortality Maps and Graphs

An interactive mapping client, lets you see the data before you.

Make you come back to see an article on making excel files in to geographical represented data.

URL: 
http://cancercontrolplanet.cancer.gov/atlas/index.jsp
http://www3.cancer.gov/atlasplus/excel.html

CRAN Taskview GIS Spatial Analysis Tool

A good website to read up on it is MapCruzer! and CRAN's site. This tool can use geostatistics and spatial regression as well and read and write geodata. It also has special tools for disease analysis and ecological analysis.

URL: 
http://cran.at.r-project.org/web/views/Spatial.html

IPLAN Data System - Public Health Statistics Generator for Illinois

The Illinois Department of Public Health has an excellent dataset generator for every Illinois county and MSA across the state. In addition to disease and mortality statistics, you can integrate a wide variety of related demographic and socioeconomic data.

URL: 
http://app.idph.state.il.us/data/CountyLevel.asp?menu=1