{"id":1221,"date":"2012-05-03T22:45:14","date_gmt":"2012-05-04T03:45:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ideasillustrated.com\/blog\/?p=1221"},"modified":"2012-05-03T22:45:14","modified_gmt":"2012-05-04T03:45:14","slug":"much-ado-about-coughin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ideasillustrated.com\/blog\/2012\/05\/03\/much-ado-about-coughin\/","title":{"rendered":"Much Ado About Coughin’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Whether you know it as whooping cough or the 100 days’ cough, pertussis<\/a> — a bacterial infection that causes severe coughing fits — is no fun. According to Wikipedia, it affects nearly 50 million people annually and\u00a0causes almost 300,000 deaths worldwide. Although most of these deaths occur in developing nations, pertussis is the only vaccine-preventable disease<\/a> that is associated with increasing deaths in the U.S.<\/p>\n

Pertussis can be particularly dangerous for young children, so health departments keep a pretty close eye on local\u00a0outbreaks and ask parents to keep their kids home from school while undergoing treatment. Unfortunately, the infection is very contagious and early symptoms are pretty mild. Combine this with some\u00a0parental fears surrounding the vaccine<\/a> and you’ve got a pretty good recipe for the occasional quasi-epidemic.<\/p>\n

This year’s “winner” in the whooping cough stakes\u00a0is apparently Wisconsin. As\u00a0of April 21, 2012, the CDC estimates<\/a> that the Badger State has had over 1,000 cases\u00a0of pertussis, which is about as many cases as\u00a0all of the Pacific Coastal states combined. Among these unlucky cheeseheads\u00a0were the two fully-vaccinated kids that currently live under my roof. (My wife speculates that they picked it up at an extremely packed showing of The Hunger Games<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

Now that the quarantine period is over and my two little data points are on the mend, I thought it would be interesting to use some of the CDC data to experiment with Google Charts. I was especially interested to note that Google had a treemap <\/a>feature. In the chart below, the size of the rectangles represents the current number of whooping cough cases, while the colors represent the increase<\/span> or decrease<\/span> over the same period in 2011. (Note: in the revised treemap option, the size of the rectangles represents the current number of whooping cough cases per million in population.)<\/p>\n

Pretty simple example, no drill downs or tooltips for now.
\n<\/p>\n

U.S. Cases of Whooping Cough (April 21, 2012)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Toggle Between Cases and Cases per Million<\/p>\n