Malaria survey data and geospatial suitability mapping for understanding spatial and temporal variations of risk across Kenya.

Malaria remains a public health concern in Kenya where children and pregnant women are vulnerable groups. The common interventions in place to fight malaria include using insecticide-treated bed nets (ITNs), knowledge and awareness about malaria, and intake of malaria anti-malaria drugs. Despite the availability of these interventions, Kenya still records more than 10,000 clinical cases annually.

The power of interactive maps for communicating spatio-temporal data to health professionals.

While more and more health-related data is being produced and published every day, few of it is being prepared in a way that would be beneficial for daily use outside the scientific realm. Interactive visualizations that can slice and condense enormous amounts of multi-dimensional data into easy-to-digest portions are a promising tool that has been under-utilized for health-related topics. Here we present two case studies for how interactive maps can be utilized to make raw health data accessible to different target audiences: i) the European Notifiable Diseases Interactive Geovisualization (ENDIG) which aims to communicate the implementation status of disease surveillance systems across the European Union to public health experts and decision makers, and ii) the Zoonotic Infection Risk in Twente-Achterhoek Map (ZIRTA map), which aims to communicate information about zoonotic diseases and their regional occurrence to general practitioners and other healthcare providers tasked with diagnosing infectious diseases on a daily basis.