WHO

Introduction

The WHO package allows the user to download public health data from the World Health Organization's Global Health Observatory in a dynamic and reproducible way.

The package can be installed from either CRAN or Github (development version):

# From CRAN
install.packages("WHO")

# From Github
library(devtools)
install_github("expersso/WHO")

library(WHO)

Usage Example

The get_codes function returns a data frame with series codes and descriptions for all available series:

library(dplyr)

## 
## Attaching package: 'dplyr'

## The following objects are masked from 'package:stats':
## 
##     filter, lag

## The following objects are masked from 'package:base':
## 
##     intersect, setdiff, setequal, union

codes <- get_codes()
head(codes)

## Source: local data frame [6 x 3]
## 
##            label
##            (chr)
## 1 MDG_0000000001
## 2 MDG_0000000003
## 3 MDG_0000000005
## 4 MDG_0000000006
## 5 MDG_0000000007
## 6 MDG_0000000010
## Variables not shown: display (chr), url (chr)

(To retrieve additional meta information (e.g. French and Spanish descriptions, category breakdowns of series, etc), use get_codes(extra = TRUE).)

To find a series of interest, use either View(codes) in Rstudio, or search with regular expressions:

codes[grepl("[Ll]ife expectancy", codes$display), ]

## Source: local data frame [3 x 3]
## 
##           label                                         display
##           (chr)                                           (chr)
## 1 WHOSIS_000001                Life expectancy at birth (years)
## 2 WHOSIS_000002 Healthy life expectancy (HALE) at birth (years)
## 3 WHOSIS_000015               Life expectancy at age 60 (years)
## Variables not shown: url (chr)

The codes data frame also provides a url to the meta data for a specified series:

# Opens a browser with the meta data for the specified series
browseURL(codes$url[1])

Having found the series of interest (in the label column), we can easily retrieve the data and, for example, make a chart:

library(ggplot2)

df <- get_data("WHOSIS_000001")

head(df)

## Source: local data frame [6 x 8]
## 
##                country                              gho  year
##                  (chr)                            (chr) (dbl)
## 1              Andorra Life expectancy at birth (years)  1990
## 2 United Arab Emirates Life expectancy at birth (years)  2000
## 3 United Arab Emirates Life expectancy at birth (years)  1990
## 4            Australia Life expectancy at birth (years)  1990
## 5            Australia Life expectancy at birth (years)  2012
## 6              Belgium Life expectancy at birth (years)  1990
## Variables not shown: worldbankincomegroup (chr), region (chr), sex (chr),
##   publishstate (chr), value (dbl)

df %>% 
  filter(sex == "Both sexes") %>% 
  group_by(region, year) %>%
  summarise(value = mean(value)) %>% 
  ggplot(aes(x = year, y = value, color = region, linetype = region)) +
  geom_line(size = 1) +
  theme_light(9) +
  labs(x = NULL, y = "Life expectancy at birth (years)\n", 
       linetype = NULL, color = NULL,
       title = "Evolution of life expectancy (by region)\n")

Disclaimer

This package is in no way officially related to or endorsed by the WHO.