[R] WHO Anthro growth curve macros and R

[Thomas Lumley]

On Mon, 28 Dec 2009, Gustaf Rydevik wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I've got a project where I have to calculate weight-for-age Z-scores,
> preferably using the WHO standards.
>
> WHO have been very nice to publish macros for doing this in both
> STATA,SPSS, SAS and Splus formats
> (see http://www.who.int/childgrowth/software/en/), but for some reason
> have chosen not to use the free R alternative to Splus.
>
<snip>
> I'm considering trying to read in spss files and massaging them to fit
> to the format that the splus macro is expecting, but I'd prefer to be
> able to use the Splus files directly.
>
> Has anyone on the list tried using the WHO anthro macros with R, and
> can tell me how they did it?
> Alternatively, could some, very kind, person try and open the Splus
> files, and save them in a R-readable format?

It looks as though only very minimal editing of the S-PLUS code would be needed to make it work in R, and read.spss or read.dta would be able to read in the SPSS or Stata versions of the reference data. Making an R package would be pretty straightforward. However,  the license says

"The User is not permitted to modify, adapt, translate, reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble, 
or otherwise attempt to discover the source code of the software, without prior permission from 
WHO.  "

I'm assuming that simply echoing the .ssc file to the screen doesn't violate this, but anything that would make the functions usable probably would.

      -thomas

Thomas Lumley			Assoc. Professor, Biostatistics
tlumley at u.washington.edu	University of Washington, Seattle