Programmatic Data Retrieval from the WHO"
In WHO: R Client for the World Health Organization API

knitr::opts_chunk$set(cache = FALSE, warning = FALSE, error = FALSE, 
                      message = FALSE, fig.path = "")
library(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)

codes <- get_codes()
glimpse(codes)

(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), ]

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)

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")