PHA-Exch> Shaping the world to illustrate inequalities in health

[Claudio Schuftan]

From: Ruggiero, Mrs. Ana Lucia (WDC) <ruglucia at paho.org>
crossposted from : EQUIDAD at listserv.paho.org

 *Shaping the world to illustrate inequalities in health* *Danny Dorling,
Anna Barford
Social and Spatial Inequalities Group, Department of Geography, University
of Sheffield, England
*Bulletin of the World Health Organization  -Volume 85, Number 11, November
2007, 821-900 *Available online at:
http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/85/11/07-044131/en/index.html *

"……Visualizing inequalities in health at the world scale is not easily
achieved from tables of mortality rates. Maps that show rates using a colour
scale often are less informative than many map-readers realize. For
instance, a country with a very small land area receives less attention,
whereas a large, sparsely populated area on a map is more obvious.
Furthermore, unlike our visual ability to compare the lengths of bars in a
chart, we do not have a natural aptitude for translating different colours
or shades to the magnitudes they represent. Here we introduce another
approach to mapping the world that can be useful for illustrating
inequalities in health.

Where do you think most infants in the world are born, where do most die and
how have these measures changed since 1970? A map of birth rates would not
help you much, unless you had the kind of memory that could associate
several hundred areas with counts of their populations of young women, and
had the ability to perform some quick mental arithmetic of rate reciprocals.
Nor would maps of death rates help much in answering these questions. Seeing
the world shaped by how many babies are born in a year is a more reliable
and rapid way of communicating these numbers…."
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