Saúde Pública na perspectiva socioambiental: um estudo de caso, Fortaleza, Ceará, Brasil

Abstract

The main objective of this research is to study public health from a socio-environmental perspective in the city of Fortaleza. As well as describing the epidemiological and climatic data, verifying whether there is a relationship and influence of climatic variables on the incidence of selected diseases in the population of the city of Fortaleza. The methodology consists of collecting data on four diseases that are present in the daily life of the municipality. Dengue, Leishmaniasis and Leptospirosis data were extracted from the SIMDA Platform and DATASUS for analysis and tabulation. The first part analyzes the general information of each disease, such as the total number of cases by region and by age group, contextualizing it with other social data such as education, HDI, HDI - income and sanitation coverage index. The second part analyzed the data using basic descriptive statistics, and the third part consists of investigating whether the epidemiological and climatic data have a normal distribution, so the Shapiro-Wilk test was used as a reference value. The fourth part consists of using linear regression, to find out if the generated model explains the number of notified epidemiological cases, where the climatic variables are considered independent, while the number of disease cases are the dependent variables. The climatic variables were analyzed individually, to find out if there is any relationship with the epidemiological variables, and subsequently the correlation coefficient was calculated. The last step was to calculate the incidence of the four diseases for the city of Fortaleza, during the selected period. From the survey, it was possible to verify that the regions V and VI, from Fortaleza, presented the highest number of cases of the diseases, at the same time that they presented the lowest social indicators, during the entire period of analysis; while regional II had the lowest number of cases and while it had the highest values of social indicators, the climatic variables showed a weak correlation with the epidemiological variables. With the regression models it was possible to identify the variables that influence the increase or decrease in cases of Dengue, Leishmaniasis and Leptospirosis in the city of Fortaleza. The incidence rate revealed that the city of Fortaleza presents an epidemic of 10 consecutive years of Dengue. Therefore, it is valid to conclude that the population of regions V and VI are the most vulnerable, with this it is necessary to make efforts by the public power to act efficiently and strategically within the territory, seeking a fair, egalitarian society and in the reduction of vulnerabilities.