April 30, 2014 — Is there a link between hot, muggy weather and asthma? Will more or fewer people suffer fall-related sprains as cold-season climate warms? It would be (relatively) easy to answer questions like these if the huge masses of data that have been collected worldwide on  environment, climate, weather and health could easily be linked. But differences in scale, scope and data collection methodology have made such linkages virtually impossible — until now.

Joining a growing number of efforts to bring big data to bear on solving human problems, the University of Exeter and partners have launched the Medical and Environmental Data Mashup Infrastructure project, a three-year initiative to bring together databases for climate, environment and human health; build compatibility among them; and make them accessible through a single Web portal. With the help of sophisticated statistics and geographic information system technology, MEDMI will provide data resources that allow researchers, public health practitioners and others to, for instance, explore correlations between climate and infectious disease or issue health alerts based on weather forecasts.

“We’re imagining a world where a regional cold snap can be associated with flu cases and hospital admissions as it happens,” writes Lora Fleming, director of the European Centre for Environment and Human Health at Exeter, in a post at The Conversation. “We’re hoping that long-term predictions about climate and human health hot spots can help us to plan our cities so that they are more resilient.” Photo courtesy of Iko (Flickr | Creative Commons)