Diffusion Pattern and Hotspot Detection of Dengue in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Journal of Tropical Medicine Volume 2012, Article ID 760951, 11 pages doi:10.1155/2012/760951 Research Article Diffusion Pattern and Hotspot Detection of Dengue in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil ´ 1, 2 1 Jose Eduardo Marques Pessanha Pessanha, Waleska Teixeira Caiaffa, 1, 2 ˜ 2 Maria Cristina de Mattos Almeida, Silvana Tecles Brandao, and Fernando Augusto Proietti1 1 Belo Horizonte Observatory for Urban Health (OSUBH), UFMG, 30130 Belo Horizonte, MG, Brazil 2 Municipal Health Secretariat of Belo Horizonte, 30130 Belo Horizonte, MG, Brazil ´ Correspondence should be addressed to Jose Eduardo Marques Pessanha Pessanha, edumpessanha@ Received 15 September 2011; Revised 1 November 2011; Accepted 2 December 2011 Academic Editor: M. C. Field ´ Copyright © 2012 Jose Eduardo Marques Pessanha Pessanha et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. This study considers the dengue occurrence in the city of Belo Horizonte over the last fifteen years. Approximately 186,000 cases registered from 1996 to 2011 were analyzed. The home address of individuals whose dengue case was notified was used as a proxy for exposure location. For determining possible outbreaks of disease and the specific patterns of dengue cases, spatial statistics u