The Appalachian Overdose Mapping Tool illustrates the relationship in each Appalachian county between overdose deaths and socioeconomic factors, including poverty, unemployment, education, and disability. The tool was designed and developed by the University of Chicago’s NORC Walsh Center for Rural Health Analysis, the Health Media Collaboratory, and Visualization Laboratory in partnership with the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC), according to the website.
The Washington Post mapped the percentage of individuals with high-risk health conditions relative to the nation’s average for each census tract, along with data on racial demographics, household overcrowding, health insurance coverage and the CDC’s social vulnerability index. The map includes every census tract in the country.
The data allowed investigative data reporter Aaron Williams and graphics reporter Adrian Blanco to conclude that a majority of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Washington, D.C. are “in some of the city’s densest neighborhoods, which have large majority-minority populations as well as high rates of chronic health conditions,” they told the Center for Health Journalism at USC Annenberg. The findings highlight long-standing health disparities which have left disadvantaged communities far more vulnerable during the pandemic.
In July 2018, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD and TB Prevention added 11 new indicators on HIV and, for the first time, social determinants of health to its AtlasPlus, an online tool that gives users the ability to create customized tables, maps and charts using 15 years of CDC surveillance data on HIV, viral hepatitis, sexually transmitted diseases (STD’s) and tuberculosis (TB). The social determinants of health, includes five indicators: poverty, uninsured, less than a high school education and vacant housing nationally and by state and county; percentage of population living in rural areas nationally and by state; and county urbanization level. The link to the tool is here.
The Neighborhood Atlas, launched in June 2018, is an online platform that allows for easily ranking and mapping neighborhoods according to socioeconomic disadvantage. Seeing a neighborhood’s socioeconomic measures, such as income, education, employment and housing quality, may provide clues to the effects of those factors on overall health, and could inform health resources policy and social interventions.
County Health Rankings: A project of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, these maps helps offer a way to visualize a host of health data across the United States county-by-county. RWJF’s maps use community-based data to track everything from walking scores and chronic disease to income, opportunity and food security.
Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America: View 1930s maps drafted by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation in relation to current maps of inner cities to show the lasting effects of with racist redlining. HOLC maps graded neighborhoods based on environmental problems but also by the presence of low-income families, blacks, and the foreign-born. The Mapping Inequality project was founded by Richard Marciano, professor of Information Studies at the University of Maryland, and Nathan Connolly, a history professor at Johns Hopkins University.
QGIS is a user-friendly, open source geographic information system (GIS) you can use to visualize, manage, edit, analyze data, and compose printable maps. It’s licensed under the GNU General Public License. QGIS is an official project of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo).
Justice Mapping Center: Use the center’s Justice Atlas to create geographic displays of data on prison admissions, prison releases, parole, and probation from 22 states. Atlas data show, for example, that Pennsylvania taxpayers will spend more than $40 million to imprison residents of neighborhoods in a single ZIP code in Philadelphia, where 38 percent of households have incomes under $25,000. In Shreveport, La., nearly 7 percent of all working-age men living in the neighborhoods of a single ZIP code were sent to prison in 2008. In Austin, Texas, while neighborhoods in three of the city’s 41 ZIP codes are home to only 3.5 percent of the city’s adult population, they receive more than 17 percent of people returning from prison each year.
Health and wealth: Comparing Milwaukee and other metro areas: This incredibly detailed interactive map allows you to track where old hospitals have closed and new ones have opened in cities across the U.S. since 1991. It’s part of a hard-hitting series produced by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel exploring the consequences of hospital closures in America’s inner cities.
U.S. Health Map is an interactive mapping tool that lets you analyze stark differences in life expectancy and prevalence of chronic disease at the county level, developed by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, an independent research center at the University of Washington in Seattle.