Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Artigo Acesso aberto Produção Nacional Revisado por pares

BIBTEX RIS

The Estrada Real project and endemic diseases: the case of schistosomiasis, geoprocessing and tourism

2010; Instituto Oswaldo Cruz, Ministério da Saúde; Volume: 105; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1590/s0074-02762010000400031

1678-8060

Omar S Carvalho, Ronaldo GC Scholte, Ricardo José de Paula Souza e Guimarães, Corina da Costa Freitas, Sandra Drummond, Ronaldo Amaral, Luciano Vieira Dutra, Guilherme Oliveira, Crístiano Lara Massara, Martin Johannes Enk,

Parasite Biology and Host Interactions

Geographical Information System (GIS) is a tool that has recently been applied to better understand spatial disease distributions. Using meteorological, social, sanitation, mollusc distribution data and remote sensing variables, this study aimed to further develop the GIS technology by creating a model for the spatial distribution of schistosomiasis and to apply this model to an area with rural tourism in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais (MG). The Estrada Real, covering about 1,400 km, is the largest and most important Brazilian tourism project, involving 163 cities in MG with different schistosomiasis prevalence rates. The model with three variables showed a R² = 0.34, with a standard deviation of risk estimated adequate for public health needs. The main variables selected for modelling were summer vegetation, summer minimal temperature and winter minimal temperature. The results confirmed the importance of Remote Sensing data and the valuable contribution of GIS in identifying priority areas for intervention in tourism regions which are endemic to schistosomiasis.