A new deadly strain of “bird flu” – coded H7N9 – has broken out in the Shanghai area of China.
Is it more deadly than H5N1? H1N1? H7N7? Or H2N2 even?
We weren’t sure. So we took a look at the data and… well, you can guess the rest.
All the data, complete list of flu strains and extra background information: http://bit.ly/KIB_influenza
Along the same lines as Google Flu Trends, researchers at Microsoft, Stanford and Columbia University are investigating whether search data can be used to find interactions between drugs. They recently found an interaction.
Using automated software tools to examine queries by six million Internet users taken from Web search logs in 2010, the researchers looked for searches relating to an antidepressant, paroxetine, and a cholesterol lowering drug, pravastatin. They were able to find evidence that the combination of the two drugs caused high blood sugar.
The idea is that people are searching for symptoms and medications, and this data is stored in anonymized search logs. They then followed a suspicion that using the two drugs at the same time might cause hyperglycemia. Those that searched for the two drugs were more likely to search for hyperglycemia than the control group (probably those who didn't search for hyperglycemia).
The work is still in its infancy, but it'll be interesting to see how this sort of data can be used to supplement existing work by the Food and Drug Administration.
The utilization of homeopathy originated in Germany. This is formed on the deduction that our body possesses autonomous mending capacities, and it normally focuses at avoiding diseases as well as promoting spiritual well being. These holistic treatments are deservingly known as homeopathic cures rather than pharmaceutics since they include a number of organic constituents derived from minerals as well as herbs.
Josh Cothran looked at who's paid for healthcare over the past five decades, with an animated Marimekko chart.
In 1960, almost 100% of the spending on prescription drugs came out of the consumer's pocket; by 2010, out-of-pocket spending was down to 20%. Over the past 50 years, there have been major shifts in the way hospital care, physician services, long-term care, prescription drugs, and other services and products are paid for. This interactive graphic uses data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to show national spending trends from 1960 to 2010 for health care by payer.
In case you're unfamiliar with the layout, there are two visual dimensions to the Marimekko. On the vertical is percentage for the main categories: hospital care, physicians and clinical services, etc. On the horizontal is a breakdown of the main categories: private insurance, Medicare, etc. The animation brings time as a third dimension for which the overall size of the chart is constant, so pay attention to the changing relative percentages.
Adam Cole and Nelson Hsu for NPR plotted the percentage of people, ages 15 to 49, living with HIV from 1990 to 2009.
By 1990, the world had a pandemic on its hands. In 1997, the peak of the epidemic, more than 3 million people became newly infected with HIV.
Then science struck back. Drugs approved for HIV treatment in the mid-1990s proved profoundly effective, transforming AIDS from a death sentence to a chronic illness. Those treatments, combined with an international commitment to manage the disease by providing access to free drug therapy, led to a steep drop in new HIV infections.
The countries in middle, eastern, and southern Africa stand out in the chart, like Swaziland with a whopping 25.9%, but most areas cluster well below five percent. Although the drop-down filters help some with country selection, the data probably would've benefitted from a chart that had a self-updating vertical axis.
Geographers James Cheshire and Oliver O'Brien visualized life expectancy in London as a tube map.
Whilst the average life expectancy predictions show that today’s children are expected to live longer, the range is startling. For the stations mapped, it is over 20 years with those around Star Lane (on the DLR) predicted to live, on average, for 75.3 years in contrast to 96.38 years for those around Oxford Circus. The smaller disparities are no less striking. For example, between Lancaster Gate and Mile End (20 minutes on the Central line) life expectancy decreases by 12 years and crossing the Thames between Pimlico and Vauxhall sees life expectancy drop by 6 years. The stations serving the Olympic Park fair badly and contrast with the Olympic volleyball venue at Earl’s Court whose spectators will be passing through areas with far higher life expectancies and lower child poverty
The tube map metaphor is typically a stretch, in line with the periodic table of whatever, but this actually works. [via Guardian]
Help is a drug company that offers you less. Less active ingredients, less waste, less confusion, less greed. Its tongue-in-cheek website has a map of its latest sales data called "What's wrong U.S.?" A bar chart for each state shows how many people are buying products for particular maladies.
So why are the inner northwest states having problems sleeping? My guess they're up late worrying about gay marriage.