Revisiting area risk classification of visceral leishmaniasis in Brazil

摘要

BackgroundVisceral leishmaniasis (VL) is a neglected tropical disease of public health relevance in Brazil. To prioritize disease control measures, the Secretaria de Vigilância em Saúde of Brazil’s Ministry of Health (SVS/MH) uses retrospective human case counts from VL surveillance data to inform a municipality-based risk classification. In this study, we compared the underlying VL risk, using a spatiotemporal explicit Bayesian hierarchical model (BHM), with the risk classification currently in use by the Brazil’s Ministry of Health. We aim to assess how well the current risk classes capture the underlying VL risk as modelled by the BHM.