gov-public-health_skill

Overview

This skill provides direct access to CDC open data and WHO Global Health Observatory indicators for fast public health intelligence. It exposes three tools to query CDC datasets via the Socrata SODA API and to search and retrieve WHO indicator data by country and year. The skill requires no API keys and uses publicly available government APIs for reproducible, zero-cost data access.

How this skill works

The skill queries CDC datasets through the Socrata SODA API using dataset IDs and SoQL where clauses, returning surveillance, vaccination, mortality, and other records. It also queries the WHO GHO API to list indicators and fetch indicator values by indicator code, 3-letter ISO country code, and year. You can paginate, filter, and order results with standard parameters (limit, offset, orderBy) to support programmatic workflows and dashboards.

When to use it

• Monitoring disease surveillance trends from CDC datasets
• Fetching country-level WHO indicators for research or policy briefs
• Rapidly prototyping public health dashboards and visualizations
• Validating or cross-referencing epidemiological findings with authoritative sources
• Automating periodic pulls of vaccination or mortality data for reports

Best practices

• Identify the correct CDC datasetId before querying to reduce irrelevant results
• Use SoQL filters (query) and orderBy to limit data transfer and speed responses
• Cache frequent WHO indicator queries for repeated country/year lookups
• Validate country codes using 3-letter ISO to avoid mismatches
• Respect rate limits and paginate large queries using limit and offset

Example use cases

• Get CDC COVID-19 surveillance data filtered by state and date range for a dashboard
• Retrieve WHO life expectancy for a list of countries and years to build a comparative chart
• Search WHO indicators for tuberculosis to find the correct indicator code before bulk retrieval
• Pull CDC vaccination rates by age group to inform outreach planning
• Automate weekly pulls of notifiable disease counts for situational awareness