Determining the relationship between dengue and vulnerability in a Brazilian city: a spatial modeling analysis

ABSTRACT

Dengue is a viral infection transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito. This study aimed to assess the distribution of cases and deaths from dengue and severe dengue, and its relationship with social vulnerability in Belo Horizonte, State of Minas Gerais, Brazil, from 2010 to 2018. The incidence and lethality rates of dengue and their relationship with sex, age, education, skin color, and social vulnerability were studied using chi-square tests, Ordinary Least Squares (OLS), and Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) analyses. The number of cases of dengue in Belo Horizonte during the study period was 324,044 dengue cases, with 1,334 cases of severe dengue and 88 deaths. During the past few decades, the incidence rate of both dengue and severe cases varied, with an average incidence rate of respectively 1515.5 and 6.2/100,000 inhabitants. The increase in dengue cases was directly related to areas with higher social vulnerability areas and more working-age people. Also, the disease is more severe in people self-declared as black, elderly, and male. The findings of this study might provide relevant information for health services in the organization of control and prevention policies for this problem, emphasizing the most vulnerable urban areas and categories.

KEYWORDS:

• Aedes
• spatial regression
• health information systems
• time series
• Brazil

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the workers at SUS BH for their efforts to control and mitigate the impacts of infectious diseases, generating fundamental data for conducting the analysis.

This work was funded by the CNPQ, under the financing code 433418/2018–4, with support from the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel-Brazil (CAPES)-Financing Code 001.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the CAPES - Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel-Brazil [001]; CNPQ - Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico [433418/2018–4].