El uso de Sistemas de Información Geográfica - CDIA-EC ...

El uso de Sistemas de Información Geografica y Sensores Remotos (SR) en Salud Pública
Bogotá, Colombia, 27 al 30 de Marzo de 2006
Estimating the prevalence and incidence of Trypanosoma
cruzi infections in rural Colombia and Venezuela.
Clive Davies, Felipe Guhl, Dora Felicangeli & Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum.
Andean Governments have committed themselves to eliminating vectorial transmission
of Chagas disease by 2010. The appropriate measure of progress towards this target is
a measure of incidence in the population living in areas of endemic transmission.
However, national monitoring programmes usually report only prevalence of infection
detected by serological tests, either in surveys in endemic rural areas, or through more
indirect measurement in blood banks, often in cities. For diseases where infection leads
to permanent seropositivity, prevalence measures can give a very misleading
impression of current infection rates if they are not carefully analysed.
This is illustrated by the contrasting situations in Colombia and Venezuela. Applying
simple epidemiological models to surveys of Trypanosoma cruzi seroprevalence in
children, we separately estimate prevalence and incidence in the rural populations of the
areas of the two countries considered endemic for T. cruzi transmission. The estimated
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