n the past few days:
(1.) Since the first case was confirmed on Sept. 19, according to the U.N.’s Cholera Inter-sector Response Strategy for Haiti, the humanitarian response has been led by the Ministry of Public Health and Populations (MSPP) with support from the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) and the World Health Organization. The PAHO interactive map of the epidemic represents cholera cases with varying shades of red, giving the viewer a quick understanding where cases are concentrated. It is, however, somewhat difficult to decipher anything other than at the macro-level. From the PAHO website you can also click on a map of health related resources in Haiti is simply called “Resource Finder”. At first glance this is an impressive list of health facilities, their availability, capacity, and services. Upon closer inspection, however, under each of those categories “No information” was posted instead. This google doc. explains that this list is of all facilities before the earthquake.
(2.) The Health Map, which I have written about before, uses color coded pushpins overlaid on a Google Map to represent validated reports of cholera cases as well as information about where to find clean drinking water and health facilities. According to their website, their maps are populated by data combed from “20,000 global news and health Web sites and blogs each hour.” Reports are sorted by disease, relevance and location. And “it uses text-mining algorithms to aggregate and sort this information.” An “Alerts-Now-Showing” box beneath the map gives a list of each of the reports, sorted by date. Useful overlays include:
- New Safe Water Installations
- Water Points
- Haiti health facilitates
- Cholera treatment centers
- Emergency shelters
HealthMap displays a note that they are collaborating with CrisisMappers and Humanity Road and their combied efforts were recently highlighted in a CNN report: Texts, Maps Battle the Haiti Cholera Outbreak. The article states the importance of the effort:
“On the mapping side of things, volunteers around the world are sorting through text messages, tweets and emergency response information to create real-time maps that can be used to push emergency aid to places where it is most urgently needed. Those maps are also available to local people with internet access.”
(3.) Biosurveillance map was created by Dr. James Wilson of the Haiti Epidemic Advisory System (HEAS), find his blog at Biosurveillance. They boldly state: “While the UN OCHA maps and official MSPP reporting tends to focus on Artibonite and points north, there are other areas routinely not included on the OCHA maps that have reported cholera. We opt on the side of “cholera until proven otherwise” or when political sensitivity is such that full disclosure and transparency allows.” Collaborators for Biosurveillance include: CrisisMappers, HealthMap, InSTEDD, ProMED, Society of Critical Care Medicine, Ushahidi, Vethnography, Wildlife Conservation Society.
I find this map very hard to interpret, however. There is simply a symbol representing cases on a Google map. There is no other information available by clicking on the icon. For better information, skip the map and go instead to their blog which has some useful statistics regarding total cases and fatalities by region.
(4.) Reports culled from tweeted messages are curated by hand and placed on a Google Map by the Project EPIC team. From their website:
Our team and an ever-growing group of collaborators involved in Crisis Camps have developed, evolved, deployed, and technologically leveraged a hashtag-based syntax to help direct Twitter communications for more efficient data extraction for those communicating about the Haiti earthquake disaster. Use requires modifications of Tweet messages to make information pieces that refer to #location, #status, #needs, #damage and several other elements of emergency communications more machine readable.
Color-coded icons represent different categories of data, typical of maps with overlays of information on one platform. For example, orange icons 