According to the UK Office for National Statistics, “there were 90,232 deaths occurring in England and Wales [between 1 March and 17 April 2020] that were registered by 18 April; 20,283 of these deaths involved the coronavirus (COVID-19).” The following map plots this data which has been made available at small area statistics on May, 1st, showing the COVID-19-related deaths as a share of all cause deaths in each area of the two nations. The left map shows a conventional map for reference, while the cartogram on the right is proportional to each areas respective population, so that more populated urban areas appear larger than sparsely populated rural areas:
Tag Archives: health
Smoke and mirrors: Smoking Prevalence and Tobacco Advertising Policies
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Cigarette smoking and other uses of tobacco are major contributors to preventable illness and death. A 2008 World Health Organization (WHO) report estimated that around 70 per cent of the adult male population in Russia was smoking. Another WHO study estimated that prevalence of smoking amongst women is about one fifth of that amongst men. Prevalence levels of daily smokers are generally lower.
Global HIV Prevalence
As part of the new Sustainable Development Goal 3 which aims to “ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages” the UN concludes, that “the incidence of [HIV] has declined globally since 2000. […] The incidence of HIV was highest in sub-Saharan Africa, with 1.5 new cases per 1,000 uninfected people.” Despite longer term positive trends, a recent UNAIDS report stated that “new HIV infections among adults have stalled, failing to decline for at least five years.” This shows that HIV remains a global challenge that needs continuing prevention efforts and ongoing awareness and education. In 2015 it was estimated that globally 34.0 to 39.8 million people are living with HIV. The following cartogram shows the countries of the world resized according to the adult population (aged 15-49) living with HIV, complemented by two maps showing the corresponding relative percentages:
Meat Eaters
Multiple Dimensions of Poverty
Poverty and global development are not only on the agenda at the World Economic Forum in Davos. But despite positive trends being observed in the aftermath of the Millennium Development Goals poverty still persists.
As a successor to the Millennium Development Goals (MDG), the United Nations announced a set of 17 new Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) relating to international development. Still on top of the agenda remains the issue of poverty. Here the new goal is to ‘end poverty in all its forms everywhere’ by 2030, meaning to ‘eradicate extreme poverty for all people everywhere, currently measured as people living on less than $1.90 a day’ and to ‘reduce at least by half the proportion of men, women and children of all ages living in poverty in all its dimensions according to national definitions’.
There are trends in past decades that indicate major improvements in tackling the problem of global poverty. In relative terms, the original MDG goal of halving extreme poverty between 1990 and 2015 has been met. In developing regions, people in extreme poverty now make up 14 per cent of the population there, while most recent figures and estimates suggest that still over two billion people globally live on less than $2 a day, a measure used to measure ‘moderate’ poverty. This figure is also used as a base for the main cartogram below. The map modifies the size of each country according to the total number of people there who live on up to $2 a day according to the most recent available estimates. In addition, the colour shading uses information from the 2015 Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) to highlight the percentage of the population that is multi-dimensionally poor.
The global inverse care law: a distorted map of blindness
“Eye care for all” is the motto of this year’s World Sight Day. But there are stark global inequalities in access to eye care. In 1971, Hart described the, ‘Inverse Care Law’ as the availability of good medical care varying inversely with the need for it in the population served. Hart was describing the situation in the National Health Service in Great Britain at the time in which he practiced as both a General Practitioner and an epidemiologist.
Two recently published articles demonstrate the ‘Inverse Care Law’ on a global level. The prevalence of blindness worldwide in 2010 was reported by the WHO and verified that low- and middle-income countries, as expected, have the highest prevalence of blindness and visual impairment. In stark contrast to this, a more recent report describes the,“Number of ophthalmologists in training and practice worldwide” providing global data for the number of ophthalmologists per county and demonstrates that despite a growing number in practice the gap between need and supply is widening.
The situation is also magnified within individual countries of high, middle and low-income. For example, in France, an inverse correlation was found between the number of ophthalmologists and the prevalence of low vision for subjects of similar age and socio-professional category and another example is in Kenya where of the 86 practicing ophthalmologists, 43 are based in Nairobi (personal correspondence). That equates to 50% of the countries ophthalmologists serving 8% of an already underserved population.
We have developed two cartograms to depict the data from these two papers using Gastner & Newman diffusion-based method. This allowed us to create density-equalised maps based on the absolute values provided in the papers. In the maps, each of the reference areas (WHO regions and countries) is resized according to these values. Larger areas represent higher numbers and smaller areas proportionally smaller data values:
