Your new post is loading...
India and Nigeria, not California.
Vaccinations and public health are in the news lately, mostly with a focus on the United States. But it's worth taking a look at this map Benjamin Hennig made of where children go unvaccinated on a global basis to help put things in perspective: You can see here that India (the enormous yellow blob) and Nigeria (the large light-orange blog that dominates western Africa) are the two countries that combine very large populations with low immunization rates. The Philippines, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Congo, and Ethiopia also seem like major problem spots. Clearly in most of these places the problem is a lack of financial and institutional resources rather than explicit anti-vaccine sentiment. Insofar as politics are relevant it's in terms of setting priorities.
Tags: medical, development.
Unit 2
Benjamin Hennig's map of the world displays the number of unimmunized children in the world. The larger the immunization rate, the smaller the country and the lower it is, the larger the country appears. Even though some parents in The United States are choosing not to immunize their children, those numbers still have no comparison to those in Nigeria or India which are the largest due to lack of money and resources.
The use of different sizes to present the data is very helpful and makes it easy to determine the highest and lowest rates but a key for the countries would be helpful since they are so distorted.
When I viewed this map I was quite shocked to see that India had the highest amount of unvaccinated children in this world. The lack of finical stability could be a major factor for India, Nigeria and other locations such as Congo or Bangladesh. Instead of the news focusing on places with unvaccinated children such as California, who by the way is more stable than India. The news and government should take it upon themselves to help these countries since the priorities of the government right now are not being placed appropriately. This map gives a good perspective of how unvaccinated children are globally, not by showing numbers but rather showing by the size. The yellow blob ( India) should not be as enormous as it is, instead of funding and worrying about unnecessary places, the focus should be on helpless and unstable locations.