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Preventable Diseases

In this visualization project, we will be creating visualizations to take a look into diseases which have been declined in the first world countries but are still prevalent in low-income countries.

For the sake of simplicity, we will be using the United States as a benchmark, and we will be taking a deeper dive into the 10 lowest income countries in Africa.
Hence, whenever we mention Africa, we are referring to the 10 lowest income countries in Africa.

The metric used for first 4 graph is the mortality rate per 1000. For graph 5 we used new incidence per 1000.

Interactive bar graph

We start by comparing the most prevalent diseases in Africa (by mortality rate per 1000) to their mortality rate in the United States.
If you are curious to know what are the most prevalent diseases in the United States instead, then click to sort by United States and compare their corresponding mortality rate in Africa.

By default, the top 4 diseases are shown, but you can see more by clicking the add button (or less by clicking the remove button)! You can also hover over individual bars to see their mortality rate.

Plot:

Few things should catch our eye, we can see that the distribution of the mortality of Infectious and parasitic diseases, Neonatal Conditions and Respitory infections is very one sided. Infectious and parasitic diseases includes diseases such as tubercolosis, STDs, HIV e.t.c. and they make up the largest proportion by 3 times as much.

In these force directed graph, we can compare the the nodes to see make-up of diseases in the Africa vs United States. Hover over the nodes to see which disease it is and size of the node is proportional to its prevalance.

Force directed graph

Plot:

The purpose of this graph is to examine the composition of diseases in United States vs Africa

What piqued my interest is how infectious and parasitic diseases is by far the largest disease in these poor African countries, but almost non-existent in the United States.

Lets make chloropleth to explore this trend more.

World chloropleth

Plot:

Observing from the chloropleth it seems like our hypothesis is true that countries in Africa are more prone to Infectious and parasitic diseases.

Hovering over a country will highlight them if you are curious!

We might notice the value for some of the countries is zero this is because some of the countries in my geojson did not exist in my original datset or vice versa.

Interactive line chart

One of the deadliest type of Infectious disease is HIV (excluding STIs). The graph below shows the number of new incidences of HIV(per 1000). All the top 4 countries are African countries, and we compare their rate to United States.

If you are curious you can add any country from the drop down menu bar and the pattern will be clear that African countries have way higher HIV rates than rest of the world.

If the graph gets too cluttered you can use threshold to remove lines below a certain value.

Plot:

This trend proves that these diseases are easily eradicable just as they have been eradicated in the first world countries. With financial help, they can also be eradicated in these lower income countries as more money can be alloted to healthcare.

This is crucial because these are deaths that can be easily prevented with a little bit of help.