Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center

Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center unites comprehensive care and advanced research to provide the latest cancer treatment options and accelerate discoveries that prevent, treat and defeat cancer and infectious diseases worldwide. Based in Seattle, Fred Hutch is an independent, nonprofit organization and the only National Cancer Institute-designated cancer center in Washington. We have earned a global reputation for our track record of discoveries in cancer, infectious disease and basic research, including important advances in bone marrow transplantation, HIV/AIDS prevention, immunotherapy and COVID-19 vaccines. Fred Hutch operates eight clinical care sites that provide medical oncology, infusion, radiation, proton therapy and related services and has network affiliations with hospitals in four states. Fred Hutch also serves as UW Medicine's cancer program.

Science Education Partnership

The Science Education Partnership (SEP) at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center is a professional development program for secondary science teachers that has been sponsored by Fred Hutch since 1990. SEP has a strong commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion and makes the resources for hands-on biology available to schools that could otherwise not afford them. Since its inception, over 600 science teachers have participated, reaching over 400,000 students.

Development

For Teachers

Create a walkthrough that provides a guided exploration of the data here. We have created some walkthrough tutorials to highlight some of the relationships that exist in the data.

• Lung Cancer Mortality and Smoking Rates: This highlights a strong positive relationship between deaths from lung cancer and smoking rates. This relationship is expected because smoking is a known cause of lung cancer.


• Cervical Cancer Mortality and HPV Vaccination Percent: This highlights a strong negative relationship between deaths from cervical cancer and the HPV vaccination rates. This relationship is expected because the HPV vaccine can help prevent cervical cancer.


• Melanoma Mortality and UV Exposure: This highlights an unexpected negative relationship between the variables. This would provide a good opportunity to explore potential confounding variables.

Data Sources

Data for this website came from a variety of sources that are all listed below. To account for the outliers that many of these datasets contain, the top and bottom 1% of data are ignored when choosing the color scale for the maps. The outliers are still rendered.

• National Cancer Institute: Cancer incidence and mortality rates for all cancers and specific cancer types. All cancer rates are age-adjusted which means that the rate is adjusted to take into account the ages of the residents in each county or state. This allows values to be compared across counties with very different age demographics. There are cases where county-level data is not very complete but the state data is complete. In those cases, the values for counties with missing data are extrapolated based on the state and county values that we do have. This data source also provides information about some cancer risk factors like smoking rates and preventative screening rates as well as demographic information like median household income. Most data is from 2014 through 2018.
• North American Association of Central Cancer Registries: Provides Hodgkin's Lymphoma incidence rates from 2015 through 2019. This data was not available from the National Cancer Institute.
• Environmental Protection Agency: Data about walkability of each neighborhood and air quality within counties. The walkability data is from 2019 and takes into account intersection density and proximity to transit. The air quality data is from 2010.
• Department of Transportation: Provides a list of all oil spills that occurred from 2010 through 2017.
• Oak Ridge National Laboratory: In collaboration with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency this dataset lists all locations of hospitals in the US as of 2022.
• Social Vulnerability Index: Combines metrics provided by the Center for Disease Control to identify communities that may be at increased risk to natural or human-caused disasters. This data is from 2020.
• United States Department of Agriculture: Aggregates data about access to healthy food and poverty level to get a metric called “low income and low access” which represents the proportion of residents who are in poverty and live far away from the nearest supermarket. This data is from 2019.
• United States Census: Aggregates data on language barriers faced by residents. This data is from 2020.
• Science Base Catalog: The estimated annual agricultural pesticide usage by county is provided by the National Water Quality Program and U.S. Geological Survey. This data is from 2013-2017.