Inform’ACTION — An Atlas of Pacific Health, 1998–2013

PL. I

The record, issue by issue.

Bar height / articles per issue

Thirty-seven dispatches, from July 1998 to 2013. The pale bar holds the full issue; the inked bar holds the articles matching your filters. Select a mark to read its contents and reach the original PDFs.

Dashed head: month not stated. Small overline: supplement available. 1998–2013 / the complete run

PL. II

An ocean of correspondence.

Circle area / articles mentioning a territory

Twenty-two countries and territories, anchored to geographic coordinates. Some appear repeatedly; others only briefly. Select an island marker to follow its paper trail. Circle sizes retain the same scale as you travel through time.

One scale, every view. Area is proportional to the article count, calibrated against the full archive. A cross means zero matches. Dashed rings mark a selection. Positions are reference points, not territorial boundaries.

Pacific-centred / equirectangular reference grid Editorial attention ≠ incidence

PL. III

What returned. What emerged.

Articles / pathogen / year

Dengue runs through the record; other names surface for a season. Read down a year or follow a pathogen across it. Select a cell to open its articles. This plate ignores the pathogen and issue filters, but respects the other filters.

Fewer More Colour scale relative to view · —

NOTES

Three traces worth following.

A reading of the collection

2007

Yap / recognition

Before the world knew Zika.

The first large recognised Zika epidemic was reported here while it was still unfolding. The bulletin also recorded a warning: PanBio and PENTAX anti-dengue IgM kits returned false positives on Zika-confirmed sera. A new disease, seen through an old test.

01 / Read the Zika articles

1944

French Polynesia / long memory

The record reaches further back.

A bulletin published from 1998 carries histories much older than itself. Dengue serotype accounts reach back to 1944 in French Polynesia and to 1971 in Vanuatu and New Caledonia. The publication date is not the beginning of the story.

02 / Read the dengue articles

49 days

Kiribati / the distance to a result

Not a shortage of knowledge.

Solomon Islands, 2002: three sentinel sites without syringes to draw blood. Niue, 2009: influenza A detected, but no transport medium for typing. Kiribati: 52% of TB cultures lost, with a 49-day median shipping delay. Consumables and transit time shaped what could be known.

03 / Explore laboratory articles

Reader’s caution / method

An island with a larger circle was written about more.
Not necessarily ill more often.

What this atlas can, and cannot, say.

Tags are detected, not hand-indexed. Country and pathogen terms were identified in text extracted from the PDFs. Thirty articles have no detected territory; sixty-one have no detected pathogen. The search field searches catalogue titles, not the full PDF text.
Detection misses things. The Marshall Islands’ 2000–01 Ebeye/Lae cholera outbreak appears inside an article about Pohnpei. “Substantial coverage only” requires at least four mentions of a territory. It sharpens geographic attribution, but can exclude real material. Without a territory selected, it changes the map’s counts rather than removing articles from the list.
Some attributions share a page. Sixty-four articles share an extracted text with another article on the same PDF page. Their individual tags are less certain.
Dates follow the bulletin’s cover. Issue 8 is catalogued under 2000, but its cover reads May 2001, where it is placed here. Issue 36 and the 2013 Special Issue state no month; both are plotted at mid-year with dashed heads.
Counts are not additive across tags. An article can mention several places and pathogens. Circle area uses a fixed full-archive scale, without a minimum nonzero size. The heatmap’s colour scale is recalculated for the current view; exact counts are available on hover or keyboard focus. The map’s straight 180° meridian is a reference: the civil International Date Line deviates from it.
Articles and whole issues are separate. The harvested catalogue contains 468 entries: 422 articles and 46 whole-issue PDFs. Whole-issue files are offered as “Full issue” or supplement links, not counted as articles. The collection spans 37 issue identities.