Percent living in poverty, 2004

Last week I posted a link to new interactive maps of obesity in the United States, produced by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. This week we continue the theme with the CDC’s new Social Determinants of Health Maps.

The Division for Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention explains the rationale for the maps in terms laid out by the CDC’s Social Determinants of Health Working Group:

Social determinants of health are factors in the social environment that contribute to or detract from the health of individuals and communities. These factors include, but are not limited to the following:

  • Socioeconomic status
  • Transportation
  • Housing
  • Access to services
  • Discrimination by social grouping (e.g., race, gender, or class)
  • Social or environmental stressors

The 15 maps on the CDC website correspond imperfectly to this list of social influences on health. The first set of “socioenvironmental” factors includes maps of county-level data for poverty, unemployment, white collar workers, high school education, college education, and urban-rural classification. The next set of “sociodemographic” factors includes percent of population ages 65 or older and the standard bureaucratic set of racial and ethnic categories. The last set on health care focuses on health insurance and the prevalence of neurologists and physicians who specialize in cardiovascular disease.

As the CDC recognizes, this set of factors only scratches the surface of social influences on population health. But it’s useful to have access to maps that illustrate the striking spatial organization of basic factors such as poverty, race, and health care at a national scale. The maps also help to make clear that health inequalities are about much more than health care: Anyone who saw these maps next to similar maps of cardiovascular disease or any other major cause of death would quickly see that the distribution of poverty matters more for population health than does the distribution of cardiologists.