The Map Room

Paul Di Filippo reviews Tom Koch’s Disease Maps in the Barnes and Noble Review. “What cannot be overlooked about this book is something incidental but overwhelming: the visual beauty of these maps. Colored and drawn by hand in most cases, with exquisite calligraphy, they offer aesthetic joys divorced from their mortal reality. Seldom has mass death looked so graphically alluring.”

Previously: Disease Maps.

• Buy Disease Maps at Amazon.com (Canada, UK)

The Guardian maps measles cases across Europe. There are more of them lately, thanks to fewer children being administered the MMR vaccine.

Via MapHist comes word of a forthcoming book by Tom Koch, due out in June: Disease Maps: Epidemics on the Ground. From the publisher’s website:

Disease Maps begins with a brief review of epidemic mapping today and a detailed example of its power. Koch then traces the early history of medical cartography, including pandemics such as European plague and yellow fever, and the advancements in anatomy, printing, and world atlases that paved the way for their mapping. Moving on to the scourge of the nineteenth century — cholera — Koch considers the many choleras argued into existence by the maps of the day, including a new perspective on John Snow’s science and legacy. Finally, Koch addresses contemporary outbreaks such as AIDS, cancer, and H1N1, and reaches into the future, toward the coming epidemics. Ultimately, Disease Maps redefines conventional medical history with new surgical precision, revealing that only in maps do patterns emerge that allow disease theories to be proposed, hypotheses tested, and treatments advanced.

• Buy Disease Maps at Amazon.com (Canada, UK)

The map of global obesity (see previous entry) came to us from The Economist’s Daily Chart blog, which “publish[es] a new chart or map every working day.” Yesterday’s entry was a map of world alcohol consumption based on WHO data. (Executive summary: Europeans are boozers.) Via @Thierry_G.

A map from The Economist charts the growth in male global obesity between 1980 and 2008. It’s based on a study published in the Lancet: more detailed and granular data (and maps) are here. Says The Economist: “Polynesia aside, obesity was a rich-world phenomenon in 1980. By 2008 the rich world had itself expanded, bringing obesity to groups within countries that were previously considered poor, such as Brazil and South Africa.” Very few countries have bucked this trend: the Democratic Republic of Congo and, puzzlingly, India. Flash required. Via The Daily Dish.

Previously: Obesity and Transportation; Diabetes and Obesity in the U.S.; Mapping Obesity; Health Maps Roundup.

Slate has produced an interactive map of diabetes in America, based on county-by-county estimates from the CDC for the years 2004 to 2008. Via @GOOD. Previously: Diabetes and Obesity in the U.S.; Diabetes Atlas….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Fine particulate matter (PM2.5) is a form of air pollution that has been linked to a number of diseases like asthma, bronchitis and cardiovascular disease, and is suspected as the cause of millions of premature deaths worldwide. Researchers at…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Good correlates how Americans get to work with obesity rates in a map-like infographic that is, well, information-dense and hard to follow at a glance. You have to look closely at each state’s box to see where they rank….  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Surgical Sieve, published in the British Medical Journal, is a differential diagnosis tool in the form of a London Underground map. The Collins Maps Blog has the background….  •  Continue reading this entry.

In the current issue of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, there’s a study that models — and maps — the estimated prevalence of diabetes and obesity at the U.S. county level. It’s always…  •  Continue reading this entry.

ABC News critiques the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s map of influenza (both seasonal and H1N1) activity, arguing that it fails to show the differences in severity from state to state or within states — all but…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The online version of the International Diabetes Federation’s Diabetes Atlas, the fourth edition of which was released this month, shows country-by-country data on the incidence of, deaths attributable to, and costs associated with diabetes. Via Glenn….  •  Continue reading this entry.

A report to be published in the June 2009 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine maps the responses to a telephone survey asking about respondents’ mental health, National Geographic News reports. “This county-by-county map shows the percentages…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Jim Gimpel has a map that shows that Americans without health insurance are not evenly distributed across the country: Clearly the South and Southwest stand out on this map as areas where the uninsured are highly concentrated. In the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The third edition of The Tobacco Atlas was published by the World Lung Foundation and the American Cancer Society last month; the paper version is complemented by the online Tobacco Atlas, which presents a series of interactive maps of…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Briefly noted: Geoweb Guru reviews Scott Davis’s GIS for Web Developers; on Vector One, Jeff shares his notes on three recent books from ESRI Press (Building a GIS by Dave Peters, the second edition of Getting to Know ArcGIS Desktop,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The City of New York’s health department has, since last November, been mapping the city’s rat population in an effort to get a better handle on its rodent control efforts. Time has an article: Today, rodent complaints by residents from…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A map of British obesity has been compiled from statistics collected by general practitioners, the BBC reports. Via Infonaut, which presents a similar obesity map for Ontario, Canada. Can’t be compared: the Canadian map starts at 40.9 percent, whereas…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Malaria Atlas Project has released maps and other data (including .kmz files) showing the global limits of Plasmodium falciparum malaria. Via La Cartoteca….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Quickly, a few maps on health-related subjects, in all their choropleth glory: An animated map of obesity in America, tracking state-by-state obesity rates from 1985 to 2004. Via Boing Boing. Via Cartography, atlases published by the American Cancer Society, available…  •  Continue reading this entry.