2/25/2011 Inactivity & Diabetes maps from the CDC

After reading it on vacation, my wife and switched our morning newspaper from The Boston Globe to USA Today (with the Weekend Edition Wall Street Journal on Saturday). We have been very pleased.

From a “Business GIS” point of view, USA Today has been doing a very nice job covering the state-by-state release of the Census 2010 data, with articles about ‘Latinos guide growth spurt’ (in Texas), ‘Population continues to shift away from rural areas’ (in South Dakota), and ‘Hispanic surge seen in USA’s Pacific Northwest’ (in Oregon and Washington).

On Thursday, February 17, 2011, they published a page 1A article titled ‘Activity, health: By county’ with a subheading “CDC maps show diabetes, inactivity ‘very closely tied’”. Unfortunately, they did not show any maps!

A search on the “Centers for Disease Control and Prevention” website turned up the maps:

http://apps.nccd.cdc.gov/DDT_STRS2/NationalDiabetesPrevalenceEstimates.aspx?mode=PHY

Indicator = ‘Physical Inactivity’ is the first map, Indicator = ‘Diagnosed Diabetes’ is the second map:



A third map shows Percentage of Adults Who Are Obese:


“When you actually take all three maps together, it really does give you this clear picture that the Southern and Appalachian areas on all three — obesity, diabetes and inactivity — are very closely tied to each other. It lets you step back and gives the big picture,” says Ann Albright, director of the CDC’s Division of Diabetes Translation.

In a nutshell, that is what a Geographic Information System (or Computer Cartography, or Desktop Mapping) is very good at: allowing the user to step back and get "the big picture".