Google-Mapping Vulnerability to Disease

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Poynter Institute ...

Google-Mapping Vulnerability to Disease

Toronto Star

The Toronto Star maps out which local schools might be most

threatened by the current measles outbreak.

As a public health and medical reporter, I'm always looking for

sites that use new technologies in ways that illuminate these

topics. As far as newspapers are concerned, I've been mostly

disappointed on this front. I see a lot of database-driven

interactive features on meth labs, homicides, and severe weather --

but not much on disease outbreaks or other public health concerns.

I find this odd, since the non-mainstream-media blogosphere has

taken to this approach to covering public health in a big way. For

instance, there's the crowdsourced independent site Who Is Sick?,

which I've written about for the University of Minnesota's Center

for Infectious Disease Research & Policy. Also, a group of

obsessives who call themselves FluBlogia create and distribute daily

maps of avian flu outbreaks.

....But at long last the Web site of a major daily paper has

satisfied my yearning -- and it's so cool! The Toronto Star's new

Map of the Week project has published a set of school vaccination

maps which illuminates an ongoing measles outbreak in the Toronto

metro area -- the worst in more than a decade. (Public-health aside:

Measles is no joke. We think of it as a common disease of childhood,

but it can cause very serious illness in vulnerable persons, and it

is extremely contagious. OK, sermon over.)

In Ontario, as in the U.S., measles vaccination is compulsory --

with some specific exemptions. Usually enough children are

vaccinated to keep the infection from taking hold and thus keep the

community protected (a concept called " herd immunity " ). However, if

enough parents decline to have their children vaccinated, a disease

can break through the wall of immunity that vaccination places

around a group.

What the Map of the Week project has done is to show where this wall

might crumble next. They did this without breaching medical privacy

(always a challenge in public health stories) by mapping the

vaccination rates and exemption percentages of Toronto schools. The

resulting map illustrates, by school and by neighborhood, where

vaccination rates are lowest (as low as 31 percent) -- and therefore

where herd immunity is weakest.

The links didn't come through - but

http://www3.thestar.com/static/googlemaps/starmaps.html?

xml=080530_vaccination1.xml