Correlação entre casos de leptospirose e o índice pluviométrico no município de João Pessoa - Paraíba

Abstract

Leptospirosis is a zoonotic bacterial disease, extremely important epidemiologically. Outbreaks of the disease are constantly reported, and it is of fundamental importance to understand it in order to subtract the risks inflicted by the pathology. As a result, a descriptive ecological study was carried out, in order to correlate the cases of leptospirosis with the rainfall index in the city of João Pessoa-PB, between the years 2009 and 2019, to elucidate the temporal distribution of cases of the disease. Data on cases of leptospirosis were obtained from the Notifiable Diseases Information System (SINAN), population data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) and data on rainfall from the websites of the National Institute of Meteorology (INMET) and the Executive Agency of Water Management of the State of Paraíba (AESA). The collected data were organized in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, according to the month and year of occurrence. For the analysis, the annual and monthly incidence of leptospirosis was calculated for each 100 thousand inhabitants and the average monthly rainfall. Next, the linear regression statistical model was applied, where the dependent variable chosen for the test was the mean incidence/month of leptospirosis cases and the independent variable was the mean result/month of the rainfall index. In the period from 2009 to 2019, 56 cases of leptospirosis were reported in the municipality of João Pessoa, representing an average annual incidence of 0.66/100 thousand/inhabitants, with the highest incidences in the years 2011 and 2018. In the regression analysis, the following values were obtained: R multiple (Pearson) 0.69, which attributed a positive relationship between the variables; the explanatory power of the R-Square of 0.47, showed that 47% of the variation in the rainfall of the municipality, which is shown to have a relationship with the incidence of the disease in the city; the value - P 0.019 attributes that the results were significant, with the level of significance (p <0.05). Therefore, the disease showed a definite seasonality, with a higher incidence in the period from March to July, coinciding with the highest rainfall, also in those respective months. It became clear in the development of this work that the incidence of the disease ends up involving many variables, both environmental and socioeconomic factors. Therefore, it is not possible to attribute the increase in the number of cases to only one aspect.