Prospective Study About the Influence of Human Mobility in Dengue Transmission in the State of Rio de Janeiro

Dengue is a human arboviral disease transmitted by Aedes mosquitoes and it is currently a major public health problem in which around 2–5 billion people are at risk of infection each year. Climate changes and human mobility contribute to increase the number of cases and to spread the disease all around the world. In this work, the influence of human mobility is evaluated by analyzing a sequence of correlations of dengue incidence between cities in southeastern Brazil. The methodology initially identifies the cities were the epidemy begins, considered as focus for that epidemic year. The strength of the linear association between all pairs of cities were calculated identifying the cities which have high correlations with the focus-cities. The correlations are also calculated between all pairs considering a time lag of 1, 2 or 3 weeks ahead for all cities except the focus ones. Centred differences of the notification number are used to detect the outbreaks. The tests were made with DATASUS-SINAN data of the state of Rio de Janeiro, from January 2008 to December 2013. Preliminary results indicate that the spread of dengue from one city to another can be characterized by the development of the sequence of shifted correlations. The proposal may be useful to consider control strategies against disease transmission.