TOXMAP

TOXMAP is a system that uses GIS to map data from the US Environmental Protection Agency Toxic’s Release Inventory and Superfund program. The website, from the National Library of Medicine (NLM), uses maps of the United States to show the location and amount of certain chemicals that are released into the environment. Users can create nationwide or local area maps that show where chemicals are released into the air, water, and ground. The maps can show facilities, color-coded releases for a single year, and chemical release trends over time.

For more information on TOXMAP, please visit the site by clicking here.

Melissa Lawrence, Rutgers Student Intern, VERTICES, LLC

Health Games Research Funding

Health Games Research: Advancing Effectiveness of Interactive Games for Health (the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF)) is currently welcoming proposals to fund research to enhance the quality and impact of interactive games that are used to improve health. The goal of the program is to advance the innovation, design and effectiveness of health games and game technologies so that they help people improve their health-related behaviors. Approximately $2 million will be available to support research projects that study one or more games designed to increase physical activity and/or improve self-care.

Important dates include: • April 8, 2009 (3 p.m. ET)—Deadline for receipt of proposals. • July 2009—Notification of finalists.

Proposal Information Packet click here.

Contact for Information: Jennifer Dobossy, program associate Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

HealthGamesResearch@rwjf.org

Office: (888) 635-7433

For more information, please follow this link to the website.

Melissa Lawrence, Rutgers Student Intern, VERTICES, LLC

Salmonella Outbreak

Salmonella is a group of bacteria that can cause diarrheal illness in people. They are microscopic living creatures that pass from the feces of people or animals to other people or other animals. There are many different kinds of Salmonella bacteria. Salmonella serotype Typhimurium is one of the most common in the United States.

Recently there has been an outbreak of Salmonella in the U.S. As of February 19, 2009, there have been 654 cases in 44 states with latest confirmed, most recent reported illness beginning on February 3, 2009. The outbreak is continuing, though the numbers of new cases have declined modestly since December. Many recently ill persons report eating peanut butter and other recalled peanut-containing products. The problem is that the illness will continue to occur because people are eating recalled peanut-containing products that are still on their shelves at home.

For a link to a GIS mapping of the Salmonella outbreaks, please click the picture above.

Melissa Lawrence, Rutgers Student Intern, VERTICES, LLC

The Drug Market Fight

This is a dissertation I found about using GIS and chaotic cellular forecasting (CCF) in order to have an early warning system for emerging drug markets. GIS is a very important tool and is especially useful when it comes to crime mapping.

To view the dissertation, please click here.

Melissa Lawrence, Rutgers Student Intern, VERTICES, LLC

Fighting Criminals one post office at a time

The United States Postal Service (USPS) Bank Service Act (BSA) Compliance Office is looking into using GIS to track money order transactions across the U.S. The technology will be effective to quickly detect suspicious activities occurring and link transactional data to reveal potential criminal patterns. This technology will further help to identify a post office or series of offices that have an unusually high number of suspicious money orders over a certain time period; view money orders that look suspicious, such as a large number of sequentially numbered money orders; or see where unusual money order transactions have occurred. The technology will also help to determine whether a number of money orders have been purchased from numerous locations and have been cashed at a single location. The data will be used not only to investigate suspicious activity and apprehend suspects but also to prosecute criminals.

For more information, please read the full article here.

Melissa Lawrence, Rutgers Student Intern, VERTICES, LLC

Right Whales and GIS

Ever thought about tracking whales with GIS? The Right Whale Mapping Project is a project that visualizes the location of right whales and surveys in the Gulf of Maine collected between 1978 and 2003 by eight different organizations using GIS. The goal of the project was to maintain an atlas of surveys and sightings to provide information on the extent of the surveys, arrival and departure of right whales from critical habitats, variability of habitat use within a given season and between years, and use of areas outside of the known critical habitats.

The published report describing this project provides insights into some of the important findings. For more information, please click here.

Melissa Lawrence, Rutgers Student Intern, VERTICES, LLC

Obesity in U.S.

CNN created this map to document obesity in the United States over the last 20 years. The data shows the growth of America’s waistline starting in the Bible Belt then spreading to the rest of the country. Obesity is one of the leading preventable causes of death in the world and rates of adult and childhood obesity continually increase each year causing authorities to view it as one of the most serious public health problem of the 21st century.

Please click the picture above to see the progression.

Melissa Lawrence, Rutgers Student Intern, VERTICES, LLC

GSDI Grant Program

This grant is geared toward the constructing of a Global Spatial Data Infrastructure (GSDI) involving the development and open sharing of digital map data. The goal is to map the entire land area of the globe at a 1-km resolution and better, with boundaries, drainage systems, transportation networks, population centers, elevation, land cover, land use, and vegetation.

Anyone who would like to partake in this project is invited, especially organizations that are not yet participating. The grant program is a valuable resource for national mapping organizations or spatial data development organizations that are leading the effort to build a national spatial data infrastructure within a country and that are, or wish to become, participants in Global Map.

You can access more information at www.gsdi.org or www.iscgm.org.

Please refer to the following documents for specific details of the Global Map/GSDI Grant program.

• Global Map/GSDI Grant Application Request Form

• Global Map Participation Form [PDF]

Melissa Lawrence, Rutgers Student Intern, VERTICES, LLC

Infection Watch Live

A new Web application, Infection Watch Live, will use geography to inform an Ontario, Canada, community about respiratory and gastrointestinal illnesses reported from nine area hospitals.

Residents of Kingston, Ontario, in Canada will soon know about any illness that hits their area because of Infection Watch Live, a mapping application on a website operated by health officials. Infection Watch Live maps illnesses, such as bronchitis and the stomach flu, in near real time based on reports from emergency rooms in and around Kingston. The application will generate summary maps of real-time respiratory and gastrointestinal data reported in emergency rooms. Online access to these maps will give health care providers, school officials, and Kingston area residents an at-a-glance picture of where to expect spikes in these illnesses. Having access to this data will provide school officials, family doctors, parents, and others with the information they need to prevent and plan for a possible spread of the illnesses.

For more information, visit http://www.kflapublichealth.ca/

Melissa Lawrence, Rutgers Student Intern, VERTICES, LLC

Malaria Mapping

This image taken over San Pedro, Belize, by a Landsat satellite, shows the distribution of malaria cases in the area. The yellow and orange dots show where most outbreaks occurred per household. The vegetation in the surrounding countryside is colored red in this image, while human settlements and roads are light blue.

A typical village in Belize consists mainly of houses with dirt floors and thatched roofs. The people are extremely poor and bathe and wash their clothes in the river. For the last ten years, they have been hit with periodic malaria outbreaks that sap their livelihoods.

The reason malaria is so bad in these villages is that the no one in Belize has the resources to combat the problem. But instead of sending people out into the countryside every six months and spraying nearly every house with insecticide to keep the disease at bay, a better solution is the use of GIS technology. The yellow dots on the photograph represent over fifty percent of malaria cases in the village. There are not many yellow dots represented. The solution come up with is that by spraying just those houses represented by the yellow dots with insecticide to repels the mosquitoes, the village could rid itself of over half of its malaria problem. GIS allowed for the pattern of highly infected malaria houses to be mapped and helped to acknowledge that this is a trend present all over Belize and perhaps the rest of the world. By predicting the risk, the cost of spraying houses and the amount of chemicals used in any given country would both drop dramatically.

For more information, please read the full article here.

Melissa Lawrence, Rutgers Student Intern, VERTICES, LLC