Five Essential Properties of Disease Maps

We argue that as the disease map user group grows, disease maps must prioritize several essential properties that support public health uses of disease maps. We identify and describe five important properties of disease maps that will produce maps appropriate for public health purposes: (1) Control the population basis of spatial support for estimating rates, (2) display rates continuously through space, (3) provide maximum geographic detail across the map, (4) consider directly and indirectly age-sex-adjusted rates, and (5) visualize rates within a relevant place context. We present an approach to realize these properties and illustrate it with small-area data from a population-based cancer registry. Users whose interests are in selecting areas for interventions to improve the health of local populations will find maps with these five properties useful. We discuss benefits and limitations of our approach, as well as future logical extensions of this work.