How health conditions relate to race, income, poverty and housing in Baltimore
In Baltimore, the neighborhood-level prevalence of some chronic health conditions rises and falls in tandem with familiar markers in the city: variations in race, income, poverty and housing. This graphic, based on a Capital News Service analysis of inpatient hospital visit records and U.S. Census data in Maryland between 2014 and 2018, allows you to explore those disease-demographic relationships for four medical conditions - hypothermia, asthma, COPD and diabetes -- by changing the dropdown menus on each map.
The right map shows demographic rates by ZIP code, the left map shows the percentage of hospital visits in each ZIP code that featured a diagnosis for a given condition. The scatterplot shows one dot per ZIP code, aligned to the selected disease condition and demographic factor; the red line shows the strength of the relationship between the two. The sharper the slope of the line, the stronger the relationship. Take asthma: in ZIP codes where the poverty rate is higher, the prevalance of asthma is also higher. This doesn't mean, necessarily, that poverty causes asthma or vice versa, just that neighborhoods with more poor peple have higher rates of asthma.