Category Archives: Disease

SnakeOil? Scientific evidence for health supplements

February 25, 2010

SnakeOil? The scientific evidence for health supplements

A generative data-visualisation of all the scientific evidence for popular health supplements by David McCandless and Andy Perkins.

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Also posted in Data Journalism, Data Visualisation, Drugs, Generative, Health, Interactive |
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Is the H1N1 Swine Flu Vaccine Safe?

November 25, 2009

Some frequent questions about the H1N1 Swine Flu vaccine answered as clearly and as visually as I could manage. A few people asked for this so I thought I would oblige.

It was hell on earth to research. There’s a jungle of science around H1N1. Very hard to hack through. You can check all my sources here.

Is the H1N1 Swine Flu Vaccine Safe?

You can check all my sources here.

UPDATE 1: Interesting story here on how the H1N1 vaccine is made

UPDATE 2: Jan 2010: There’s now a Greek version of the H1N1 Swine Flu image. (Thanks to George Papadakis) and a Hebrew version (thanks Matty)

Skeptical Sources: Centre Of Disease Control. Medscape, New England Journal Of Medicine, British Medical Journal, PubMed.

Explore the sources In this Google doc

Also posted in De-Hyping, Health, Infographic, Statistics |
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How Safe is the HPV vaccine?

October 12, 2009

I’ve been reading a lot about the HPV (Human Papillomavirus) vaccine and the risk of serious side effects and even death. I thought I would seek out the numbers and put them in context. Especially given headlines claiming the HPV jab is “as deadly as the cancer” it seeks to prevent.

How Safe Is The HPV (Human Papillomavirus) Vaccine?

A note about the UK. These are the figures for Gardasil, the vaccine used in the US. In the UK, the dominant vaccine is Cervarix. For which I have no figures. Ben Goldacre explores some important points around Cervarix. Worth reading.

(You can explore my data here. I’ve put the data on three separate sheets inside the spreadsheet. Here are the original source documents from the US Centre Of Disease Control).

If you have any figures on Cervarix or any other facts and sources that can add to this diagram, please get in touch. Thanks!

If you’re looking for information on HPV, Cervical Cancer and immunisation, try these links
: The NHS page on the cervical cancer jab
: General info on immunisation, including HPV

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Also posted in Data Journalism, De-Hyping, Health, Infographic |
 117 Comments

Fatal Infection

September 24, 2009

A few people asked for this. And I was curious about it too. So here it is. Case fatality rates for well-known diseases.

Case Fatality Rates for Well-Known Diseases
This was very hard to research. The AIDS/HIV figures are especially difficult to find. Many of the numbers are locked into the tables of 1,000,000 page PDF reports. Grrrr!

(I tell you – when I sleep these days, my dreams unfold in rows and columns…)

Anyway, if anyone can find tighter, better figures, or can think of any key diseases I’ve missed (preferably with data!), please get in touch.


UPDATE 1: I’ve added this. Thanks to Gorka Cortazar for the suggestion.

Disease Fatality rate vs Survival Time Outside Of The Body

UPDATE 2: I’ve edited the Seasonal Flu fatality figure, previously 9% to 0.1%. The original figure was based on the number of patients *severely* ill with ‘flu who died, not the overall number of infected people. Sorry for the error. (Thanks to Lucie Melahn for the correction). I’ve also reclassified MRSA to “serious” or invasive MRSA.

sources World Health Organisation, Centre For Disease Control, Guardian Datablog
see the Google doc of data for more

Also posted in Data Visualisation, Health, Infographic |
 57 Comments

Swine Flu Latest: Visualized!

September 1, 2009

With the help of the excellent Guardian Datastore, we’ve been tracking Swine Flu (“novel H1N1 virus”) as it creeps across the globe and starts to feeds into the autumnal ‘flu season. There are some surprising results.

Is the US about to face a pandemic?

The USA still has the most cases in the world. The America media are starting to pump out alarming headlines. “200,000 deaths!”. Here are the current figures.

Swine Flu: Countries with most cases Sep 2009
But when you factor in population sizes, the USA disappears off the map. (It’s actually 15th in the world)

Swine Flu: Most Infected Countries Sep 2009
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Also posted in Comparison Chart, Data Journalism, Health, News, World Map |
 50 Comments