Slashgeo

Vector One links to a patients per doctor world map: "Remarkably, Cuba leads the world (or at least those countries shown on this map) in the patients per doctor ratio. Other countries doing very well include the successor states to the communist bloc nations, which generally had good (and cheap) health care, and the developed (capitalist) nations in Europe and beyond - although the Netherlands is quite far down, and behind neighbouring countries such as Denmark, Belgium, France and Germany, if ever so slightly." See below other similar maps.

Slashdot discuss a NASA program to help predict ands prevent disease outbreaks. Their summary: "NASA and its Applied Sciences Program will be using 14 satellites to watch the Earth's environment and help predict and prevent infectious disease outbreaks around the world. Through orbiting satellites, data is collected daily to monitor environmental changes. That information is then passed on to agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Defense who then apply the data to predict and track disease outbreaks and assist in making public health policy decisions. The use of remote sensing technology helps scientists predict the outbreak of some of the most common and deadly infectious diseases such as Ebola, West Nile virus and Rift Valley Fever." I added below a few previous related stories.

Early last month the Bull's Ramble blog informs us South Africa now gets 10-m satellite imagery in NASA World Wind [several screenshots]. From the blog: "The data is from SPOT 5 provided by SpotImage and collected in 2005, it is currently only 10m resolution but looks gorgeous [...]" See also related stories below. Related to NWW, we also learn JAXA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, is using NWW to visualize data of their latest lunar explorer KAGUYA, making me wonder about the developments to their GLOBALBASE project. Update: 02/05 17:01 GMT by S : Here's a project called Africa@Home, which, similarly to SETI@Home, harness the crunching power of home computers: "The first application being developed for AFRICA@home is called MalariaControl.net. This application models the way malaria spreads in Africa and the potential impact that new anti-malarial drugs may have on the region." (via Kelly Lab blog)

From the GIS Development web site : "the Welcome Trust in the United Kingdom and institutions based around the world launched the Malaria Atlas Project (MAP) to map, model, and predict global malaria risk. [...] The mapping results aren't surprising but are unprecedented in their precision. The work signals a "maturation" in the field of malaria research and provides an important baseline in determining the success of future malaria interventions". Click here for more details.

Update: 03/03 22:07 GMT by S : This project was discussed here a little more than a year ago.