Jun 14, 2006

Population health mapping can aggregate statistics from a variety of sources and overlay the data with digital maps to help public officials target responses to problems or decide where to focus clinical resources.

One recent project used mapping to study the effectiveness of a cholera vaccine in different regions of Bangladesh. The analysis found unusually wide differences in the vaccine’s effectiveness in two areas.

“The vaccine worked in some places really well and not very well in others,” said Dr. Michael Emch, an associate professor in the Geography Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a fellow at the Carolina Population Center, a research facility based at the university. “If you didn’t map this, there would be no way to measure” the anomalies.

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