Harvard:Biophysics 101/2007/Notebook:CChi/2007-4-17

Goals

Explore the WHO website to see what information can possibly be gotten from them
- Treatment recommendations
- Frequency of deleterious allele
Find out how BioPython can be used to access the info
Contact the appropriate people to get more information on the above

Excel file of disability-adjusted life years for the WHO diseases discussed in later links found at this WHO website
International Classification of Diseases:
- ICD 10 (latest version) query site
- rich text files on the classification system, Zach talked about finding this universal disease code for future searches

Hetmann is working on treatment recommendations from the site
Frequency Statistics - WHO has insane statistics about almost anything anyone would need to know about health in the world. However, the stuff useful for our project is rare-ish.
- Incidence and Prevalence Reports of select types of diseases
  - Files are all excel files (yay!)
  - Incidence files gives incidence numbers for diseases broken down by sex and WHO subregions of the world.
  - Genetic-related diseases include various cancers, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease
  - Prevalence files give point prevalence numbers including a number of neuropsychiatric disorders
  - Clearly, this doesn't have everything, but it's a start, and it's easy to deal with.
- The WHOSIS (WHO Statistical Information System) is searchable and breaks all of the statistics seen in the above incidence files by country, but again, the limiting factor is the small number of genetic diseases covered
- Other genetic diseases with individual downloadable maps of global disease distribution
- I might try to sift through WHO's external links for other health-related statistical information
Problems
- As Hetmann points out, there is a severe lacking of genetic disease information here. The only mention of it refers to the few most prevalent diseases.
- We would be mainly concerned with finding information on the less common, less obvious diseases, which makes me wonder whether the WHO would be the best tool