Thursday, March 28, 2019

Europe's Measles Outbreak


This Measles Incident Rate Globe shows the incident rates of measles in countries around the world. The globe uses scaled circular markers to visualize the number of measles cases in each country normalized by each country's population.

The data for the map comes from the World Health Organisation. The data records the 12 months rolling incidence of measles per 1 million total population and the data was released in 2019. You can download the data yourself on the WHO Measles and Rubella Surveillance Data page. The spreadsheet containing the data is entitled 'Reported measles and rubella cases and incidence rates by Member States'.

In the twelve month period of the WHO data Madagascar has by far the biggest problem with measles with a incident rate of 2386.35 per million residents. Ukraine had the second highest incident rate of 1439.02 and Georgia had the third highest rate of 809.09.

In 2018 Ukraine had a huge outbreak of measles. According to UNICEF the worst-hit area of the country was the western Lviv region, "where negative attitudes toward immunization, and previous shortages in vaccine supply, have resulted in low vaccination rates." As you can see on the amCharts globe the huge outbreak in Ukraine has a knock-on effect throughout Europe. You can see that neighboring countries also have a high incident rate of measles. In fact in Europe as a whole measles cases more than tripled, mostly as a consequence of the Ukraine outbreak.

The measles map is a demo of amCharts Rotating Globe with Circles data visualization library. amCharts is a JavaScript library which supports a large range of charts and geographical map types. You can find many more map demos in the amCharts demos section. The Rotating Globe with Circles demo includes links which allow you to open the measles globe in CodePen or jsFiddle.

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