04 February 2013

Vaccines are Awesome in One Infographic


via Dr Daniel Flanders

Note: I will add a small caveat since the data used is not cited. However, the evidence of the impact of vaccines on diseases is overwhelming. It is just that these numbers might not be so accurate. Here's hoping the data checks out.

2 comments:

Francis Gagnon said...

Vaccines are awesome but this graph is, well... pretty bad. We can't clearly see the impact of the vaccines.

1. The length of the red bars is not proportional to the scale of the epidemic so 580 cases from tetanus occupy the same space as 4.1 million from varicell (sic), not showing the scale of the impact of a vaccine.
2. It is quite difficult to understand what the red bars mean. They use two measures to represent one, the percentage of decrease.
3. The vaccines are in alphabetical order, one of the least useful ordering. It should be by percentage of decrease, or by scale of the epidemic, before or after.
4. The numbers for before and after are far apart and nearly impossible to compare visually, which should be the point of visualizing the decrease.
5. Reading the result for each disease is cumbersome: look up the name in the middle, look at the "before" figure on the left and read it because the bar tells you nothing, then go to the right to read the "after" number.
6. The bars do not share a baseline.

And it goes on. In fact, the design is so bad that I would even doubt the data, especially in the absence of sources and authorship. For such an important topic, it's quite a missed opportunity.

Alanna Shaikh said...

Seems to me there's an opportunity here to do something cool with infogr.am...

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