Regional HIV and AIDS Data

The County HIV/AIDS Surveillance Reports for 2013, including and excluding State Prison Inmates, are now available on the DOH public web site. The graph below shows the numbers of AIDS cases and deaths in the region from 1987 forward, as well as the number of HIV cases beginning in the year 2000 EXCLUDING prisoners. Click on it to enlarge the graph.

To get full county reports visit the link above !

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County Level Health Metrics

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation has provided US County Profiles for every county in the United States. These profiles analyze the performance of all 3,143 US counties or county-equivalents in terms of alcohol use, life expectancy at birth, smoking prevalence, obesity, physical activity, and poverty using novel small area estimation techniques and the most up-to-date county-level information.

Below are summaries of the Herkimer and Oneida Counties data as well as links to their full profiles:

To see the full profiles, click on the county name below:

HERKIMER COUNTY

 

ONEIDA COUNTY

Overviews of both counties...

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Gallup Poll: Uninsured Rate Continues to Fall

According to a report by the Gallup pollsters, the percent of the population without health care insurance has continued to fall since reaching a national high of 18% in the third quarter of 2013. These data are based on more than 28,000 interviews with Americans from Jan. 2-Feb. 28, 2014, as part of the Gallup-Healthways Well Being Index. The uninsured rate is on track to be the lowest quarterly level that Gallup and Healthways have measured since 2008.

Based on the graph below, the percent of Americans who are uninsured appears to have been declining since even earlier, from around the second quarter of 2011 when it was 17.4%. Since then (other than the spike in the 3rd quarter of 2013) there appears to be a steady decline in those without insurance.

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According to Gallup, this drop in 2014 could be a result of the Affordable care Act (ACA), which aims to provide healthcare coverage to more Americans through multiple provisions, including federal and state healthcare marketplaces where Americans can purchase health insurance coverage at competitive rates. At the end of February, HHS reported 4 million people have signed up for health insurance coverage through the marketplaces established under the ACA. With the open enrollment period scheduled to close on March 31, the uninsured rate in the U.S. will likely continue to fall.

Regionally, the overall percentage of uninsured residents (the blue line in the chart below) appears to be relatively steady at around 8% of the population. If anything, there appears to be a slight uptick in the numbers since around 2010. What happens to these percentages once post-ACA data becomes available will be interesting to see.

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To get a full review of health insurance coverage for our region between 2009 and 2012, review the table below.

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Health Metrics on the County Level

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation has made an interactive map available that allows viewers to explore health trends in the United States down to the county level. Included in these trends are data on life expectancy (for your selected geography during the span 1985 to 2010), hypertension (2001 to 2009), obesity (2001 to 2011) and physical activity (2001 to 2011).

The first step to accessing this information is to decide which of those metrics you'd like to see mapped and deciding if you'd like to see it for males or females...

Next, you can type in the name of the county you'd like to get the data for...

This will bring up a map which, if you hover above the county you are interested in, shows a pop-up box with data from the FIRST year of the cycle...in the case of life expectancy, for example, the data is preset to 1985 information...

Across the bottom of the map is a sliding timeline you can use to set the year to that which interests you, or if you'd like to see how the data has changed over time, you can click the "play" button at the end of the timeline to see a transitional view of the trends over time...

 

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation was launched with the goal of providing an unbiased, evidence-based picture of global health trends and determinants to inform the work of a broad range of organizations, policymakers, researchers, and funders.