Importancia de la viruela, gastroenteritis aguda y paludismo ... - Oulu

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− Related to the age at death: ‘Years’, ‘Months’, ‘Weeks’, ‘Days’, ‘Agedays’,
‘AgeGroup’, ‘AgegroupUnder1’ (for infant deaths).
− Related to the cause of death: ‘CauseOriginal’, ‘Smallpox’, ‘Gastroenteric’, ‘Malaria’.
− Technical information about the records: ‘Num’ (individual numeric code for each
record), ‘MC’ (field for tracking changes in the information).
As can be seen in the list above, for the analysis of the causes of deaths, the original
cause was included in one field, while three others were created, one for each of the
diseases or syndromes under study. This particular innovation has advantages at different
levels: it allows the assignation of different codes to different original causes of death
related to a single disease. The use of codes, in turn, provides more freedom of movement
while exploring the data, and makes it possible to classify the different original causes at
different levels of reliability according to our certainty about its relationship with the
actual disease. The existence of a field per disease analyzed makes it also possible to
manage in a simpler way the study of those original death causes that include more that
one of the diseases studied at the same time.
For the manipulation of the data and elaboration of the results, different computer
programs were used:
MySQL was chosen to manage the database. It is a well known, open source and
efficient database management system. Calculations and graphs were done with
Microsoft Excel. The maps for the spatial analysis were done with the GIS program
ArcView.
The methods used in the study were very simple, merely descriptive but robust. The
use of more sophisticated statistical tools as time series analysis or modeling techniques
is seen as the path to follow in future studies.
4 Main characteristics of the diseases under study
4.1 Acute gastroenteritis
Gastroenteritis is, by definition, an inflammation of the lining membrane of the stomach
and the intestines. It is not thus a single disease but a syndrome, characterized by
gastrointestinal symptoms such as nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea and abdominal
disturbances.
The diseases grouped in the syndrome are basically amoebic and bacillary dysentery,
and typhoid and paratyphoid fevers.
Most gastroenteritis have an infectious origin. The infection can be produced by
different agents, essentially bacteria (Shigella, Salmonella, some strains of E. coli),
viruses (rotavirus and calicivirus) and protozoa (Entamoeba histolytica, Giardia o
Cryptosporidium). The mortality associated with gastroenteritis varies with the agent,
from relatively high for bacillary dysentery to low for paratyphoid fevers, amoebic
dysentery, etc.