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Google Maps, Disease Risk, and Migration
First time accepted submitter ecorona writes "This Google Maps mashup was published in Science (paywall warning) this week. It shows genetic risk for multiple diseases distributed across the globe. It's easy to follow the migration path and see which diseases increase/decrease in risk along human migration paths. Click on the populations to see the relative risk of the selected disease for each population. You can pick your a disease and see which populations are more susceptible. The article is behind a paywall, but the website is free to use." On a similar note, an anonymous reader points out
a British research project that "used Twitter to track and map flu-like illnesses across the U.K. to determine if epidemics were emerging. The research culminated into an online visual tool, the Flu Detector, that maps tweeted flu rates in several regions across the U.K."
We're immune mutha frackers!!!
Google also has a flu trends mapping: http://www.google.org/flutrends/us/
Many diseases have flu-like symptoms, and most uneducated people who have any of those diseases would tweet that "they have the flu" without being tested or consulting a doctor, and those false positives would be picked up by the software.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
1. You figure out where your forefathers and foremothers come from. 2. you find that place on the mashup. 3. you click on the disease you're most afraid of. 3. you look at the circles that are around the lines that go through that place. If they are red, you should be afraid. If they are yellow or orange, you should be very afraid. If they are dark orange, just off yourself now. Hope this helps, the resident science troll.
If they are red
Green maybe?
According to the map, I've been dead six years.
You are welcome on my lawn.
As an American, it's interesting that when this site talks of "migration" it pretty much means the older migrations to what is now Latin America via the land bridge. I know I've heard stories of certain European or African populations having genetic disease, and that being carried over into the US. Judging from the maps I'd guess this study takes a wider view, rather than express the realities of more recent migrations. (I'm no biologist, but this has to be interesting. The amount at which people travel these days and inter-breed probably makes for an interesting graph, maybe impossible to track at a fine grain.)
Red means higher risk and green means lower risk. There's a legend on the top left. Click on the circle that represents your ancestral origins. You can see the predicted increase in risk (likelihood ratio). It also traces the migration path your ancestors took to found your ancestral population. Click the other figure (Human Relationships) on the top left to see the same stuff but on a view that shows how all relationships on the map are related.
Then you're damned lucky, you died about the time the civilization peaked.
Well, nerds of European descent...
The genetic risk of alcoholism and extroversion from 23andMe:
http://spittoon.23andme.com/2011/10/21/genes-and-geography/
And more along the lines of the original story:
Parkinson's and BCC
This to be expected, .. the higher the live expectancy, the worse the gene pool becomes, .. in 3rd world countries people with bad genes are probably not surviving, .. due to missing medical treatment, .. so countries where live expectancy are higher, people do tend to get kids at an older age, and a lot of people with bad genes survive and are allowed to reproduce, .. I'm not saying there should be bans I'm just suggesting this is obvious, .. and everyone can come to this conclusion.
And this got nothing to do with bad habits. like alcohol, smoking, or whatever.
Let's take GERD, or, according to the NIH: "Gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) is a condition in which the stomach contents (food or liquid) leak backwards from the stomach into the esophagus (the tube from the mouth to the stomach)."
No one had GERD 25, or was it 40 years ago, because the term wasn't invented. I bet the incidence in a region can be shown to correlate with:
a. alcohol use
b. obesity
c. bungee cord use
d. pharmaceutical representative visits to doctors offices offering free plane trips to seminars re GERD in resorts
In other words, interpreting the raw data can go a long way.
Now, if a condition was found to correlate with something unexpected, like the triad of high percentile math ability within male siblings, autoimmune disease and left handedness, no that would be interesting. This triad was reported in Science sometime in the mid-1990's, and is still causing consternation.
Sign me: Lazy and anonymous. too lazy to register. Okay, too paranoid, too. (Not that they aren't out to get me. They're out to get you, and everyone else, aren't they?)
Where's the data? Has no-one migrated past Indonesia?