SAUDAVEL: Bridging the Gap between Research and Services in Public Health Operational Programs by Multi-Institutional Networking Development and Use of Spatial Information Technology Innovative Tools

This paper introduces the SAUDAVEL Project and resumes the results it has reached so far. SAUDAVEL stands for Sistema de Apoio Unificado para Deteccao e Acompanhamento em Vigilância EpidemioLogica. Infectious diseases are back in the epidemiological scenario in Brazil. Dengue fever, leptospirosis outbreaks, and violence that can be characterized as an urban endemic disease are just few examples. One of the main aspects to deal with these problems is the ability to timely detect changes in counts of cases characterizing epidemic outbreaks, and to model and identify risk and protection factors in endemic and epidemic moments. These are the new challenges for the health services in relation to epidemiological surveillance and control systems and techniques. A network of institutions have been articulated to help increasing the competence of the health sector in the control of transmissible diseases by providing the necessary new tools for the surveillance and control systems, integrating environmental aspects, risk factor detection, and automatic and semiautomatic warning methods, in search of allowing more efficient outbreak detection and its follow-up in space and time. The results of experiments carried out in three different test-sites, named Cities-Laboratory, are presented for Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte and Recife. The SAUDAVEL network interaction has generated different products; software packages for spatio-temporal data analysis, the TerraView+, TerraCrime and TerraStat; technologies for integrating an open source GIS technology with an open source statistic computing environment, with the development of the aRT and myR packages; new algorithms for imprecise urban addressing, the OnCeTa geographic geo-coding technology, and a design and implementation of an experiment in epidemiological surveillance and control system at intra-urban scales based on geographical database technology, the Recife-SAUDAVEL Aedes spp. Density Monitoring

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