Tag Archives: map

Probably more restaurant specific than geographic: Pretty map shows dirtiest places to eat in UK

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Alison Millington of Business Insider UK writes the Food Hygiene Rating System (FHRS) gives establishments that serve food – from hospitals to restaurants, takeaways, hotels, and grocery shops –a rating on a scale of 0 to 5, based on factors related to hygiene, to determine which establishments are cleanest and dirtiest.

Bad scores are given for poor practices such as employees not washing their hands properly, the presence of food debris or rodent activity.

Low ratings have even been shown to affect business, with a recent survey by Checkit.com of of 1,000 people from West London finding that 61% of diners wouldn’t eat in a place with a low score.

Content marketing agency Fractl looked at the data, which is collected by the Food Standards Agency, as of May 5, 2016 to compare the average ratings in locations across the UK in order to determine which regions have the best and worst food hygiene.

this-colour-coded-map-suggests-that-in-terms-of-food-safety-more-than-half-of-the-businesses-in-the-uk-have-good-or-higher-hygiene-standards

Pretty pictures of zoonotic disease risk

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The majority of infectious diseases currently emerging as human epidemics originated in mammals. Yet little is known about the global patterns of mammal-to-human pathogen transmission.

zoonoses.mapResearchers at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies and the University of Georgia have assembled summative world maps of what’s on record about mammal-to-human diseases. The work, which aims to question whether it is possible to predict the emergence of new zoonotic diseases, appears June 14 as part of a Review in Trends in Parasitology.

The maps include data on all 27 orders of terrestrial mammals, including rabid bats, camels carrying Middle East respiratory syndrome, the hoofed relatives of livestock that pass on foodborne diseases, and many different kinds (more than 2,000 species) of rodents. Outbreaks of diseases caused by pathogens that originate in non-human hosts (called zoonoses) are believed to be inherently unpredictable, but the maps reveal understudied patterns.

Map data were partially generated from information in the Global Infectious Disease and Epidemiology Network (GIDEON) database as well as mammal distribution maps published by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.

“Understanding where animals are distributed and why may not seem applicable to our day-to-day lives,” says first author Barbara Han, a disease ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in New York. “But the big breakthroughs that we need as a society (e.g., forecasting where the next zoonotic disease may emerge) rely on exactly this kind of basic scientific knowledge.”

Or as Worms and Germs Blogerer Scott Weese says, “The paper has a lot of comprehensive discussion of risks associated with various types of mammals (e.g. rodents vs bats vs ungulates) and various types of pathogens.

“However, since we tend to like things distilled down into pretty pictures, their maps are getting the most attention. Their assessment of the number of zoonoses in different regions might surprise some.”