1. 2017 Rate of Sexually Transmitted Disease Incidences
Comparing Rates of Sexually Transmitted Diseases to Proximity to Free Clinics in New Jersey
2017 Rate of Sexually Transmitted Disease Incidences
Introduction
Results
According to Figure 1, there is a greater number of sexually transmitted disease incidences in south Jersey than in North Jersey. Table 1 shows that the county that had the highest incident rate also had the highest number of clinics. As the incident rate decreased, the number of clinics either decreased or increased.
“Sexually transmitted diseases are the most common notifiable infectious diseases in the US.”2 In 1998, it was known that there were 15 million sexually transmitted infections annually in the US.2 This remains a serious problem within our country, calling for additional funding towards STD clinics to prevent and control the continuous spread of STDs.2
Conclusions
Data
Figure 1: This map shows the rate of sexually transmitted disease incidences within New Jersey county borders through decreasing color intensity.
From these data, it can be concluded that there is not a direct correlation between the rate of sexually transmitted disease incidences and the number of free clinics within a given New Jersey county border. This does not support my hypothesis. For future research I would include every county to get a better sense of whether there is any connection between these two variables.
The NJCountyBounds file was provided by Dr. Jordan.
The rates of sexually transmitted disease incidences for 2017 were found on NJSHAD.
The location of the clinics were found on freeclinics.com.
Table 1: This table shows the New Jersey county in question, along with its corresponding rate and number of clinics within its border.
Bibliography
Methods
NJCountyBounds. Google Drive. October
NJSHAD. Dataset Queries. October
Free Clinics. New Jersey. October
1Cates, W. JR
2Leichliter, J. S. et al
Free Clinic Locations
ArcMap was used to join attribute tables, producing a single data set containing incidents of sexually transmitted diseases to NJ county borders.
Geocoding with Google My Maps was used to place locations of free clinics into participating counties. These counties were selected at random.
Excel was used to display NJ counties with their rates and number of clinics. These counties were based on the ones randomly chosen for Figure 2.
Figure 2: This map shows the location of free clinics within these four New Jersey county borders through color coding.
Author, Contributors: Janaya Reeves