IDENTIFICATION OF RISK AREAS USING SPATIAL CLUSTERING TO IMPROVE DENGUE MONITORING IN URBAN ENVIRONMENTS

Resumo

Monitoring the occurrence and spread of epidemics is essential for improving decision-making and developing better public policies in urban environments. Besides temporal aspects, it is also essential to evaluate risk areas. However, only a few works in the literature apply spatial analysis of dengue epidemics in Brazil due mainly to a lack of data availability. Additionally, few methodologies available allow for identifying risk areas considering spatial aspects. The main objective of this work was to identify spatial clusters of risk for dengue cases according to the social vulnerability of each area. This constitutes a powerful tool for effective epidemiological and urban management. This work carries out an ecological study that considered dengue cases in São Carlos-SP, Brazil, in the years 2018, 2019 and 2020. The spatial scan technique was applied to classify the risk areas, considering the relative risk (RR) with a confidence interval of 95\% (CI95\%:) and the São Paulo Social Vulnerability Index (IPVS) to characterize these areas. Three clusters were identified in 2018, with high risk relative (RR=28.86), twenty clusters were identified in 2019, with high risk relative (RR=36.26) and five clusters were identified in 2020, with high risk relative (RR=23.32). The highest risk was located in a region with high vulnerability, and the second was in a region with very low vulnerability. These results provide information that allows the targeting of specific control actions from the early detection of cases in places with greater dengue transmissibility.

DOI: 10.36558/rsc.v12i3.7921