Swine Flu News To Death Ratio And What It Means (YouTube via Infosthetics.com)

Embed-O-Matic

• V8bUtbODV-Q&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1

Embed-O-Matic

• V8bUtbODV-Q&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1

Hans Rosling is a brilliant lecturer on global health issues and the inventor of Gapminder (purchased a year or so ago by Google and now integrated into their search results). Recently, Rosling did a very sharp video where he compared swine flu to tuberculosis:



I first saw the video on the Information Aesthetics blog which is an excellent resource for staying up on new ways to visualize data. As far as Rosling goes, if you have not seen his 2006 TED talk, you have missed one of the most interesting and enlightening 19 minute speeches ever.

Open Source Communicable Disease Surveillance Tool (Biocaster)

Developed by a Japanesse based team of international scientists, BioCaster is an attempt to text mine a number of open source data streams for breaking information about communicable diseases worldwide and then plot them in an easy-to-access/manipulate format on a Google map.

The applet is not embeddable (of course!) so, if you want to see the tool in action, you will have to go to the website or click on the map below:

Cruise Missive: NIC Publishes New Paper On Global Health, Avoids Detection (NIC)

WHO Director general To Give Webcast On Climate Change And Health

Taken in part from WHO Director General To Speak About Climate Change And Health

(Thanks, Mike!)

Dr. Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), will deliver the David E. Barmes Global Health Lecture on Monday, December 10 at 3:00 p.m. in the Masur Auditorium (Building 10) on the NIH campus in Bethesda, MD. The title of her lecture is "Climate Change and Health." It also will be videocast live at:
http://videocast.nih.gov/

Dr. Chan, who is from the People's Republic of China, was appointed to the post of WHO director-general in November 2006; her term runs through June 2012.
Previously she was the representative of the WHO director-general for pandemic influenza as well as assistant director-general for communicable diseases.

Dr. Chan served as Director of Health of Hong Kong before joining WHO. In her nine-year tenure as director, she launched new services to prevent the spread of disease and promote better health. She also introduced new initiatives to improve communicable disease surveillance and response, enhance training for public health professionals, and establish better local and international collaboration. She effectively managed outbreaks of avian influenza and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).

Additional information about Dr. Chan's lecture is available at:
http://www.nidcr.nih.gov/NewsAndReports/NewsReleases/ClimateChangeandHealth.htm