By Learned Foote - Talk Radio News Service
Today the National Minority Quality Forum launched a Web site featuring a National HIV/AIDS Atlas, a mapping project created with the assistance of the School of Public Health and Health Services at George Washington University.
The atlas, available at
http://hivmap.org, maps the prevalence of HIV/AIDS in terms of geography, creating a color-coded map that allows its users to organize the data in terms of age, gender and ethnicity. “If we think of the AIDS pandemic as a global wildfire, then the way that you fight a wildfire is to identify the hot spots, and to put them out,” said Michael Weinstein, president of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation.
The NMQF has created atlases charting diabetes and chronic kidney disease for professional use, but the HIV/AIDS atlas is their first atlas to provide information to the general public. “We felt that every community ought to know its status,” said Dr. Gary A. Puckrein, the President and CEO of the National Minority Quality Forum.
To create the map, the NMQF requested data from the departments of health in every state, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and New York City. Twenty-nine of these 54 departments provided information at the county level, and New York City had information detailed enough to compare various zip codes.
The NMQF found that just 20 counties in the U.S. are responsible for fully 40 percent of the country's HIV/AIDS cases. Two hundred counties have 80 percent of the cases. “You wouldn’t have gotten that before the data was sort of pulled together and aggregated that way,” said Puckrein. “That says that we’re dealing with something that’s highly localized.”
The NMQF announced the project from Washington, D.C., where about three percent of current residents have HIV/AIDS. "When you're looking at an atlas of HIV in this country, we are standing on ground zero," Weinstein said.
The NMQF created the atlas partly to provide hard data to assist community-based organizations and advocacy groups. The data is gathered by county lines, but the atlas also provides rough approximations that organize the data according to congressional districts, and the site also provides contact information for U.S. Representatives.
“This is the way you do health care in the 21st century,” said Dr. Puckrein. “Now you actually know where HIV and AIDS are in America.”
The atlas web site launched at 10 a.m. on Monday morning, and according to a spokesperson for the National Minority Quality Forum, received over 17,000 hits in the first six hours.