The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday announced it has launched a “Taiwan Infectious Disease Standardized Incidence Rate Map” to provide an easy way for the public to check the latest incidence rates of infectious diseases.
The map (id.geohealth.tw) was created with help from an Academia Sinica team, which developed an automatic system that collects open data — the latest statistics about infectious disease cases — from the centers and translates it into images.
Chan Ta-chien (詹大千), an associate research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences, said the system automatically calculates the latest case statistics into incidence rates, and allows the public to search for data about infectious diseases on a yearly or monthly basis, or weekly for dengue fever cases.
CDC Director-General Steve Kuo (郭旭崧) said the centers’ open data include statistics on 67 types of notifiable communicable diseases and 199 databases.
The map also provides information on the top-10 infectious diseases in a county, city or township, as well as the nation’s disease hotspots, Chan said.
For example, acute hepatitis A is among the top-10 infectious diseases reported in Taipei’s Xinyi District (信義區) this year; and three areas with the most acute hepatitis A cases are Taichung’s Central District (中區), New Taipei City’s Pinlin District (坪林) and Hsinchu County’s Paoshan Township (寶山), he said.
The map will not only help the public understand what infectious diseases are emerging in their neighborhoods and encourage people to take precautionary measures, it can also help local governments allocate budgets on preventing certain diseases, the CDC said.
The CDC said it will hold an open data application contest in the second half of the year to promote the use of open data on
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