Evolution of the Frontier Malaria in the Brazilian Amazon: A Retrospective Observational Study from a Local-Level Perspective

Alisson Barbieri , Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
Reinaldo Santos, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG)
Getúlio Fonseca, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG)

Malaria in the Amazon (known as frontier malaria) is shaped by the convergence of various factors facilitating disease transmission within a socioeconomic, environmental and political context. These factors include risk profiles, human mobility, settlement and land use patterns, and ecological changes. While extant research has explored these factors at aggregate levels such as municipalities, malaria cases have diminished and become increasingly focal over time, thus relying more heavily on local-level dynamics. We propose a novel methodology to identify community level information on malaria in the Brazilian Amazon between 2007-2023 using textual similarity methods. Then, using a combination of descriptive statistics, discrete-time multinomial models, Kernel Density and SKATER method of cluster analysis, we characterized frontier malaria and its spatial heterogeneities in the Amazon over time. We analyze how the evolution of malaria cases and differences across land uses are statistically significant, and show that the incidence of malaria cases across land uses have statistically significant differences in levels and patterns over time. Assuming that contextual factors related to distinct governmental terms influences malaria dynamics, and that the Brazilian Amazon is a vast territory containing several frontiers with distinct malaria dynamics, the spatial analysis allows understanding the space-time evolution and heterogeneity of the frontier malaria. Then, we propose a regionalization of the Amazon frontier malaria considering space-time heterogeneities and contingencies and discuss the main features of these regions testing the statistical significance of variables that the literature review suggests as those historically shaping the frontier malaria.

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 Presented in Session 60. Climate Change, Environment and Health