The Center for Disease Control’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control has just released an online fatal injury mapping model that allows you to query injury statistics to create custom maps of death rates throughout the United States. There’s a fascinating level of detail to this resource, including the intent of injury, ethnicity, age, and cost of injury. The map can be detailed at several different levels of detail, and there’s the ability to smooth and color code the data for definitions.

A new mapping tool brings together the functionality of HealthMap and Bio.DIASPORA to analyze the potential health threats to Canada due to the global convergence of people around the 2010 Olympic Games. HealthMap provides a means to track global infection trends via a Google Maps mashup that trolls the Internet for signs of emerging epidemics, while the Bio.DIASPORA system adds the global patterns of human travel via commercial airlines.

Disease outbreaks have surrounded similar global events in the past. The potential impact to Canada can be assessed with these tools,  with analysis of who is coming to Canada for the games and the types of medical issues that are experienced in the country of origin. Such a tool can be useful for future international gatherings to help the host country be more prepared.

Read more about this effort in an article in today’s Globe and Mail.

There’s an interesting and timely post in the online magazine On Windows that details a partnership between Microsoft and ESRI to create a Fusion Center, which aims to help first responders share real-time data, collaborate, and display information visually on interactive Bing maps and SharePoint-based tools. The solution addresses the need to make sense of a great deal of digital information, to act on the most important details, to analyze the information for trends, and to record and monitor that information through time.

The title of the story is “Technology Lessons from Haiti,” pointing to the need to quickly analyze information from an evolving event so that informed decisions may be made quickly. The issue of data sharing and analysis during times of emergency response is a growing area of concentration, and an area of focus at Microsoft’s Worldwide Public Safety Symposium that took place in Redmond, Washington last week.

Microsoft and ESRI launched the Fusion Core Solution this past July, and have packaged it to be fully scalable so it can be deployed by the smallest of agencies at low cost, but also be capable of meeting the needs of large federal agencies.

The Massachusetts Commonwealth Fusion Center is an early adapter of the Fusion Core Solution and the agency depends on the offering for a number of capabilities, including:

• Managed Intake — Preloaded and fully customizable forms for processing, assigning, and satisfying many different types of intelligence and information service requests
• Enterprise Search — Provides tools to search across multiple data sources including file shares, Web sites, and databases
• Robust Geodatabases — The ability to easily capture, maintain, and disseminate spatial data using the ArcGIS geodatabase
• Integrated Analytics—Powerful search and preconfigured geospatial analysis capabilities that are extendable to integrate new or existing applications
• Analyst Collaboration—Integrated capabilities to enable analyst and customer collaboration using Web sites, wikis, and blogs
• Robust Security — Can be integrated with existing authentication and auditing systems or can provide these capabilities out of the box
• Tools for Managing Operations — Powerful management reporting capabilities for managing analyst staffing and monitoring center activities

Bill Davenhall, the lead on health and human services marketing at ESRI, gave an entertaining and enlightening talk at the TedMed Conference in San Diego in October, and the video of the talk is now available for viewing. The talk centered on the connection between place history and health, and the fact that the environment in which we live has a cumulative and direct impact on our well being.

Davenhall emphasized the importance of this connection and the need to start tracking this information on personal health histories as we work to convert paper health records to digital form. He also emphasizes the need to spread the word about the GeoMedicine programs that are gaining momentum, to support this work, and to make certain young doctors factor in the connection to place in their patient diagnoses.

California received a $4.7 million grant from the the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for cyber-security projects. The bulk of the funding will go toward better domain name protection for state web sites for better information security. The state plans on spending $1 Million of the funds for a statewide digital mapping system to plot critical infrastructure and available resources to improve emergency management.

Read more in this feature in Government Technology.

In an announcement timed to coincide with the international climate conference, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency today announced that they’ve concluded that greenhouse gases are endangering public health, and that they must be regulated. The “endangerment finding” is a necessary step before the EPA can regulate carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases that are released by gasoline-powered vehicles, power plants and factories.

“These long-overdue findings cement 2009’s place in history as the year when the United States Government began addressing the challenge of greenhouse-gas pollution and seizing the opportunity of clean-energy reform,” said EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson. “Business leaders, security experts, government officials, concerned citizens and the United States Supreme Court have called for enduring, pragmatic solutions to reduce the greenhouse gas pollution that is causing climate change. This continues our work towards clean energy reform that will cut GHGs and reduce the dependence on foreign oil that threatens our national security and our economy.”

This now paves the way for the EPA to finalize the GHG standards that they produced earlier this year for light-duty vehicles. Visit the following site for more information on EPA’s findings: http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/endangerment.htm

There’s a new field called “conservation medicine” that’s making the connection between ecosystem disturbances and the spread of new pathogens from wildlife to humans. Deforestation has caused animals to move closer to population centers, and also has pushed poorer villagers to expand the kinds of wildlife that they hunt. These pressures increase the interaction between animals and humans, spreading pathogens to both livestock and humans.

“In recent years, for instance, scientists have been ferreting out the connections between climate change and human health. They’ve found that spasms of cholera correlate with changing sea surface temperatures and that diarrhea outbreaks arrive as the mercury climbs. They’ve discovered associations between seasonal weather patterns and malaria that are so strong that outbreaks can be predicted with the weather forecast.”

Read more about this topic in this feature on Yale Environment 360.

Nathan Eagle, a researcher at the Santa Fe Institute, has been named to the 2009 Technology Review Young Innovators Under 35 list. Eagle has pioneered the analysis of cell phone data to capture patterns on where and how people use their mobile phones.

“He is working with city planners in Kenya and Rwanda to understand how slums grow and change in response to events such as natural disasters and declines in crop prices. And earlier this year, Eagle began using phone-derived data to build a more accurate model of the spread of malaria in Africa. Previous models had relied on spotty information about people’s movements, collected in sporadic surveys. With a better picture of how the disease spreads, governments can improve the policies designed to fight it.”

There’s an interesting article on Environmental Research Web that discusses an effort to survey key researchers to compile feedback on ways that the Famine Early Warning System Network (FEWS NET) can be improved. The system was created in 1985 by the U.S. Agency for International Development and contains satellite remote sensing  and weather data. The survey shows an interest in rainfall, crop yield estimates, vegetation, soil moisture and flooding data, with more current forecasts of weather information.

Read more here.