Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2007. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
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Voice of America - August 10, 2007
Art Chimes
Time again for our Website of the Week, when we showcase interesting and innovative online destinations.
This time it's a global collection of health and medical statistics that provides accurate and timely information, but where the emphasis is also on ease of use: www.GlobalHealthFacts.org.
KATES: "Data on HIV/AIDS, TB, malaria and many, many other key health and socioeconomic indicators. And the important thing about it is that it's free and it provides up-to-date, easy-to-access information."
Jen Kates is director of HIV Policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, which publishes health information websites, including GlobalHealthFacts.org.
KATES: "Our site provides two things. One is, easy-to-access information on these key indicators, and the second is a whole range of indicators. We've gone out there to other sites and pulled in what we see as really important health and socioeconomic indicators, and we can grow the site over time."
Those indicators include numbers of AIDS orphans, tuberculosis treatment success with DOTS therapy, household size and population under age 15. You can see the numbers, or better yet, visualize it on color-coded maps. You can also download the data if you want to do your own analysis. And soon, says Jen Kates, they plan to have a feature on the site where you'll be able to create custom, ready-to-print reports.
KATES: "We're actually always trying to think about what users might need. And the next thing that we're going to be pushing out is a custom dataset, so you can kind of say, well I want to look at this, this and this for these four countries, and you can actually get that into a PDF."
The site's homepage features a constant stream of international health news, and you can subscribe to a variety of free email newsletters on subjects including children's health and HIV.
I've seen a lot of websites with these kinds of health data, but I don't think I've ever seen one any more user-friendly than this. Check it out at GlobalHealthFacts.org, or get the link from our site, voanews.com.
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