Bill

The current repellents in market have DEET (N, N’-Diethyl-3-methylbenzamide) as their main component, which toxicity when used in excessive quantities is already described in literature (1, 2 and 3). Aiming to act on political scope, promoting prevention and life quality to population, our team elaborated a bill based on the law that regulates condom free distribution by Brazilian public health agencies. Our proposal is that free distribution could also be done to non-toxic repellent. Therefore, those repellents without dangerous compounds could be distributed to population, ensuring prevention to diseases transmitted by insect vectors without any collateral effects.

Therefore, we contacted the city councilman José Luís Rabello and explained him the importance of our proposal. He agreed to receive our proposal and take it to City Chamber of Councilors to start discussion and feasibility of implementing it.

iGEMer Celio Dias delivering our proposal for free repellent distribution to José Luís Rabello, city councilman.

Epidemiological surveillance

According to the “Guia da Vigilância em Saúde” of the Ministerio da Saúde:

" The epidemiological surveillance systematically monitor temporal trends in the incidences of cases in each area of the city, comparing vector infestation rates; organize joint discussions with vector control teams, aid and all instances of dengue prevention and control involved, aiming at adopting measures to reduce (prevent) the viral circulation."

To the objectives:

Reduce the occurrence of preventable deaths from dengue by identifying their risk factors and defining strategies toimprove the assistance to cases. Reduce the magnitude of the occurrences of dengue through the early identification of areas with the highest probability of occurrence of cases in order to guide integrated prevention, control and organize assistance. Execute monitoring for early detection of viral circulation and change in the pattern of serotypes. Build, maintain and feed systems of information on dengue, aiming to trend monitoring and construct epidemiological indicators in order to guide actions, evaluate effectiveness of prevention and control programs, and support focused research and studies to improving surveillance and control. Provide epidemiological indicators to support the definition of groups and priority areas for use of new safe and effective technologies of control.

And on the data analysis:

Data analysis allows for assessing the magnitude of the problem, directs and evaluates the measures that have been adopted. It needs to be done systematically at all levels of the system, and their frequency will depend on the epidemiological situation and the organization of information flow. One must consider the data relating to the distribution, the vector density and the occurrence of cases, so that the information can support the analysis of the epidemiological situation and optimize the use of available control features. The data for the cases should be consolidated, grouped and sorted according to individual characteristics, time and place, to allow for a trend assessment of the disease and the comparison with the same period in previous years (if applicable). Tables should be updated periodically, as well as the endemic and epidemic curves, to provide an overview of the event and the systematic monitoring of its evolution. The reports should employ clear and accessible language, for their dissemination to the public, press and officials of health agencies. The cities may use a control diagram, which enables analyzing the levels of endemic diseases and thus identify the early epidemics.

Being aware of all this information the UFSCar-Brasil 2015 team contacted the Epidemiological Monitoring of São Carlos to get information about the number of probable cases of dengue in the city and region in 2015, as well as the number of confirmed cases and deaths related to this disease. However, the officials responsible did not have the information updated due to the high number of suspected cases and lack of human resources available to update the information into the computerized system. Seeking to mitigate this problem, team members were available to assist in posting data in the system.

This assistance was given over a week and the following difficulties in the completion of this activity were noted: reports arriving on epidemiological surveillance wer filled-out wrongly, in an illegible manner or missing data; difficulty in having a stable access to the Notifiable Diseases Information System (SINAN), a national system responsible for receiving notifications of dengue cases in the country and transfering to other public health agencies; Insufficient human resources for posting data in the SINAN.

Keeping these challenges in mind, the team UFSCar-Brasil 2015 believes that the following actions could mitigate or eliminate such obstacles:

References