Tag: Health

Mapping Global Polio Eradication

Posted on by Amy Ramsdell

World Polio Day is today, October 24, 2017.  It is a global effort to eliminate the last 0.1% of polio cases, and today we celebrate the progress over the past year. Blue Raster participates in the fight by supporting the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Global Polio Eradication Initiative.  We maintain WHO’s Polio Now interactive web map of polio cases and disease surveillance indicators.

WHO Polio Now web map

Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria are the last three countries in the world that still have cases of wild poliovirus (WPV) transmission. The remaining cases are caused by circulating vaccine-derived polio (cVDPV2). This type of polio originates from the attenuated polio virus administered as an oral vaccine that has survived, mutated, and gets transmitted from person to person in under immunized populations.  This map captures the cases of WPV and cVDPV and also displays the surveillance efforts in each country.

To learn more about the successes of Global Polio Eradication Initiative over the past year and how you can support this effort, please visit their website at www.polioeradication.org.

PHIA Project: A Drop That Counts

Posted on by Phil Satlof

Blue Raster is pleased to announce the debut of the Population HIV Impact Assessment (PHIA) Project website.

The PHIA Project, led by ICAP at Columbia University in partnership with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), collects HIV information in sub-Saharan African countries through interviews and in-home HIV testing.

In 2014, UNAIDS set treatment goals for 2020:

  • 90% of all people living with HIV will know their HIV status
  • 90% of all people with diagnosed HIV infection will receive sustained antiretroviral therapy
  • 90% of all people receiving antiretroviral therapy will have viral suppression.

Blue Raster supports these goals through:

  • building the WordPress powered PHIA website
  • creating charts, maps and graphs for PHIA Factsheets
  • launching the PHIA Data site in the coming months (a CKAN based dataset visualization and download tool)

Zimbabwe 90-90-90 chart , created by Blue Raster

“We’re glad to have the PHIA website up and running thanks to Blue Raster. We look forward to expanding this resource for HIV data as our project continues.” -Lory Frenkel, Communications Officer, PHIA Project

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