Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Artigo Acesso aberto Produção Nacional Revisado por pares

BIBTEX RIS

The urban environment from the health perspective: the case of Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil

2005; Escola Nacional de Saúde Pública, Fundação Oswaldo Cruz; Volume: 21; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1590/s0102-311x2005000300032

1678-4464

Waleska Teixeira Caiaffa, Maria Cristina de Mattos Almeida, Cláudia Di Lorenzo Oliveira, Amélia Augusta de Lima Friche, Sônia Gesteira e Matos, Maria Angélica Salles Dias, Maria da Consolação Magalhaes Cunha, Eduardo Pessanha, Fernando Augusto Proietti,

Climate Change and Health Impacts

This study aims to determine spatial patterns of mortality and morbidity for five health problems in an urban environment: homicides, adolescent pregnancy, asthma hospitalization, and two vector-borne diseases, dengue and visceral leishmaniasis. All events were obtained through the city health database and geoprocessed using residential addresses and 80 planning units consisting of census tracts. We used thematic maps, proportionate mortality/morbidity ratios by planning unit, and the overlapped rank of the 20th worse planning unit rates for each event. A spatial pattern of high rates of homicides, proportion of young mothers, and hospitalization due to asthma overlapped in socially and economically disadvantaged areas. For the two vector-borne diseases, high rates with great dispersion were found in underprivileged areas, in contrast with very low rates among higher income areas. The results indicated the coexistence of heavier disease burden for residents of urban areas where poverty and lack of effective public health policies may be modulating social health problems. For the two vector-borne diseases, an environmental intervention in one mosquito-borne disease might be playing a role in the other's incidence.