A dynamic analysis of tuberculosis dissemination to improve control and surveillance

Detailed analysis of the dynamic interactions among biological, environmental, social, and economic factors that favour the spread of certain diseases is extremely useful for designing effective control strategies. Diseases like tuberculosis that kills somebody every 15 seconds in the world, require...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2010-11, Vol.5 (11), p.e14140
Main Authors: Zorzenon dos Santos, Rita M, Amador, Ana, de Souza, Wayner V, de Albuquerque, Maria Fatima P M, Ponce Dawson, Silvina, Ruffino-Netto, Antonio, Zárate-Bladés, Carlos R, Silva, Celio L
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analysis
Brazil - epidemiology
Cause-effect relationships
Control
Correlation analysis
Disease control
Disease transmission
Diseases
Economic analysis
Economic factors
Epidemiology
Geography
Geospatial data
Health risks
Humans
Incidence
Infectious Diseases/Epidemiology and Control of Infectious Diseases
Infectious Diseases/Respiratory Infections
Infectious Diseases/Tropical and Travel-Associated Diseases
Information dissemination
Information processing
Mathematical models
Medical research
Mortality
Mycobacterium
Population Density
Population Dynamics
Population Surveillance - methods
Public Health and Epidemiology/Preventive Medicine
Public Health and Epidemiology/Social and Behavioral Determinants of Health
Recruitment
Socioeconomic Factors
Spreading
Surveillance
Tuberculosis
Tuberculosis - epidemiology
Tuberculosis - prevention & control
Tuberculosis - transmission
Vaccination
Citations: Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Detailed analysis of the dynamic interactions among biological, environmental, social, and economic factors that favour the spread of certain diseases is extremely useful for designing effective control strategies. Diseases like tuberculosis that kills somebody every 15 seconds in the world, require methods that take into account the disease dynamics to design truly efficient control and surveillance strategies. The usual and well established statistical approaches provide insights into the cause-effect relationships that favour disease transmission but they only estimate risk areas, spatial or temporal trends. Here we introduce a novel approach that allows figuring out the dynamical behaviour of the disease spreading. This information can subsequently be used to validate mathematical models of the dissemination process from which the underlying mechanisms that are responsible for this spreading could be inferred. The method presented here is based on the analysis of the spread of tuberculosis in a Brazilian endemic city during five consecutive years. The detailed analysis of the spatio-temporal correlation of the yearly geo-referenced data, using different characteristic times of the disease evolution, allowed us to trace the temporal path of the aetiological agent, to locate the sources of infection, and to characterize the dynamics of disease spreading. Consequently, the method also allowed for the identification of socio-economic factors that influence the process. The information obtained can contribute to more effective budget allocation, drug distribution and recruitment of human skilled resources, as well as guiding the design of vaccination programs. We propose that this novel strategy can also be applied to the evaluation of other diseases as well as other social processes.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0014140