Health & disease mapping
Mapping health: John Snow’s cholera map, CDC PLACES and life expectancy by tract, age-adjusted rates, overdose deaths, scan statistics, hospital access and the ecological fallacy.
A health map puts cases, rates or estimates on the places people live, and its hardest questions are not cartographic. Is the number counted or modelled? Does it allow for age? Are neighbouring areas really different, or within each other’s uncertainty? Was it built for the same boundaries you are joining it to? The answers decide whether a pattern on the map is about health or about the method.
The guides here work through real data: John Snow’s 1854 cholera deaths, CDC PLACES tract estimates for Cook County, the CDC Social Vulnerability Index, and USALEEP life expectancy, which ranges from 59.9 to 90.0 years across the county’s tracts. Every number comes from running the code on the page.
🧭 Start with the concepts
The ideas the how-to guides below assume you already have.
⚙️ Then do the task
Step-by-step walkthroughs with code you can copy and adapt.
- How to Recreate John Snow's Cholera Map in Python
- How to Make a Kernel Density Map of Disease Cases in Python
- How to Map CDC PLACES Health Estimates by Census Tract in Python
- How to Map Life Expectancy by Census Tract in Python
- How to Calculate Age-Adjusted Death Rates in Python
- How to Map County Drug Overdose Death Rates in Python
Show every how-to guide in this topic
- How to Find Disease Clusters With a Spatial Scan Statistic in Python
- How to Aggregate Tract Health Estimates to Neighbourhoods in Python
- How to Make a Bivariate Map of Health and Poverty in Python
- How to Measure Distance to the Nearest Hospital in Python
- How to Compare Asthma Estimates With Air Pollution in Python
- How to Map Health Estimates by ZIP Code in Python
- How to Analyse Pedestrian Deaths with FARS in Python
- How to Count Weather Deaths by Event Type, Place and Age
- How to Map Mice, Rats and Roaches in Restaurant Inspections
🔧 When it breaks
The errors this topic produces, with the cause explained rather than just the command.
Related topics
Subjects that keep coming up alongside this one, most overlap first.