Students map disease hotspots in Brazil
BRAZIL - Wearing crisp, white T-shirts and carrying tablets, the students fan out through Marechal Rondon – a bustling favela spread over hillsides and a valley in Brazil's north-eastern city of Salvador. As they walk, they map blocked drains and piles of rubbish on their tablets. These are the “infection points” that attract the rats and mosquitoes which, in turn, spread diseases like leptospirosis and the Zika virus, both prevalent here. Student Alexandre Santos, 20, stops before a weighhigh tangle of wild plants overlooking a housing block. “We look at sewers, rubble, garbage. Now there is high vegetation,” Santos says, tapping in the data. “It goes straight into the data bank.” Tourists flock to Salvador for its vibrant Afro-Brazilian culture and colonial architecture. But just 10km away, the health issues in its favelas are studied by doctors and researchers from international universities for the Urban Health Programme – an international project that recruits locals like Santos to research their own communities.
“People are impressed to find out about our work as we go through the neighbourhood or territory,” says student Jonas Nascimento, 19, plotting infection points with Santos. “They can see we want to help.” Their favela is home to more than 20,000 people who battle the health issues compounded by poverty, unemployment and poor sanitation. Armed drug gangs operate here, their teenage lookouts scouting the neighbourhood for rivals and police for £50 a week. It is one of several neighbourhoods studied by the programme, which was set up in 2003 by academics and researchers from the Federal University of Bahia, Brazil's Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, a government research institute, and the Yale School of Public Health in the US. It's funded by the National Institutes of Health in the US and Medical Research Council in the UK. In Marechal Rondon, a young man leads a horse into a swamp covered in green vegetation into which raw sewage flows. Ricardo Lustosa, a postdoctoral researcher in public health at the Federal University of Bahia, who runs the programme in this community, warns him of the risk of catching leptospirosis if he has a cut in his bare feet. Lustosa gestures towards pieces of wood and broken plastic piled up beside a road. “This is the perfect place for mosquitoes and rats to reproduce,” he says. In Marechal Rondon, 11% of the population has the leptospirosis bacteria. About 10% of people with the bacteria develop a severe form of disease causing multiple-organ dysfunction, which is fatal in 5-15% of cases. Salvador reported 113 suspected cases last year, of which 42 were later confirmed. Programme organisers hope young favela residents volunteering for the programme will also campaign for the structural changes needed to alleviate health problems. “Our objective is to create activists and community leaders,” says Lustosa.
(Global Development)