After several years on the health beat, I've learned that covering health more comprehensively means paying more attention to how people’s health is affected by where they live.
Ann Moss Joyner is president of the Cedar Grove Institute for Sustainable Communities, a nonprofit organization based in Mebane, North Carolina that provides research and mapping services in cases involving civil rights, predatory lending and institutional discrimination. Ms. Joyner is the co-author of numerous scholarly publications on using geographic information systems to expose exclusionary zoning and annexation practices. She has a bachelor’s degree in liberal arts from New College and a master’s degree in business administration from the University of North Carolina.
California's Central Valley, once called "the richest agricultural region in the history of the world," is a 400-mile-long swath of some of the world's most productive agricultural land. About one-fourth of the produce consumed in the United States is grown in the Central Valley -- and nearly half of all pesticides used in this country are sprayed on crops in the region.
Journalists are using geographic information software (GIS) to map data for stories and graphics about toxic health threats, prescription medicine abuse and EMS response times. Here are more ideas for using GIS in your health reporting.
