Tegumentary leishmaniasis in Brazil: priority municipalities and spatiotemporal relative risks from 2001 to 2020

ABSTRACT

Understanding the distribution of tegumentary leishmaniasis (TL) in different periods enables the adequate conduction of actions at the public health level. The present study analyzes the spatiotemporal evolution of TL incidence rates in the municipalities of Brazil and identifies priority areas from 2001 to 2020. Notifications of new cases were analyzed employing space-time scan statistics and Local Indicators of Spatial Association. As TL incidence rates presented a downward trend in most Brazilian municipalities, spatiotemporal clusters of high relative risks (RR) were more frequent in the first decade of the series. There was a concentration of those clusters in the North and Northeast regions, mainly in the Legal Amazon area. More recent high-RR areas were identified in municipalities of different regions. The number of priority municipalities showed a stable trend in Brazil. There was a great concentration of such municipalities in the states of Acre, Mato Grosso, Rondônia, Pará, and Amapá, as well as large areas in Roraima, Amazonas, Maranhão, and Tocantins, and smaller areas in the states of Goiás, Ceará, Bahia, Minas Gerais, São Paulo, and Paraná. The present study contributes to the understanding of the historical evolution of TL in Brazil and subsidizes actions to combat the disease.

KEYWORDS:

• Cutaneous leishmaniasis
• spatial analysis
• control
• epidemiology
• Satscan

Disclosure statement

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

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/20477724.2024.2367442

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Pan American Health Organization under Grant number [SCON2021-00,153], by Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior – Brasil (CAPES) under code [001] and by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (Cnpq) under process [311309/2023-2].