"Data mash-up": a new infrastructure for connecting health and environmental data.

A large proportion of global diseases can be linked to environmental factors, with chemical hazards, changing habitats for disease-carrying insects and community behaviours all playing a growing role. As climate change continues to drive changing weather patterns, these environmental factors are predicted to have ever greater impacts on human health and wellbeing. Yet research into the links between environmental factors and health remains fragmented, hampered by a lack of common tools and databases needed to investigate connections across a number of environmental factors and health conditions.

By linking databases on climate, weather and disease, MEDMI (a novel infrastructure at the University of Exeter) is, for the first time, attempting to create a resource that will allow researchers to shed light on these complex interactions. This seminar will present the aims of the MEDMI project, the challenges encountered and how some of these were addressed. It will then present demonstration browsers for the analysis of extreme temperatures, air quality and mortality, and for the analysis of climate and infectious diseases. It will conclude with a discussion of current capabilities available and future planned developments.

Christophe Sarran is a senior Science consultant at the Met Office, supporting the health research activities of the Health Programme to achieve its targets and deliver high quality research into the links between weather and health. Specifically, this has included developing the warning service that is delivered to COPD patients, contributing to the development of the cold weather health warning service delivered to the Department of Health, the analysis of seasonal-affective disorder symptoms with respect to luminance related weather variables and the analysis of the impact of air quality on COPD patients’ health. Christophe Sarran is currently coordinating the Met Office’s health research programme.

Please email Leala Watson if you wish to attend.