Controle da dengue através da estratégia de liberação de Aedes Aegypti geneticamente modificados: avaliação de impacto a partir do método de controle sintético

Abstract

Dengue is a viral disease that spreads more rapidly in the world. Fighting the spread of its vector, the Aedes aegypti mosquito, represents a complex problem not only in Brazil, but also around the world. Given the persistence of the problem, resulting from the inefficiency of conventional methods, some municipalities have adopted innovative biological control strategies. Among them is the release of the genetically modified mosquito, (called OX513A), a lineage of male mosquitoes developed by the company Oxitec, in which the offspring of mating between the transgenic mosquitoes and the savages inherit a lethal gene and do not survive adult life. The strategy has already been implemented in the municipalities of Juazeiro/BA, Jacobina/BA, Piracicaba/SP, Juiz de Fora/MG and Indaiatuba/SP. In the present study, we evaluate the impact of this strategy on the incidence of dengue in the first three municipalities to receive treatment in Brazil, through the synthetic control method of Abadie and Gardeazabal (2003), which allows the construction of a counterfactual for the treated municipalities through the optimal weighting of municipalities that did not adopt the strategy. The notifications of dengue cases per semester of the Brazilian municipalities was used as a variable of interest and as predictors were used the Human Development Index (HDI), demographic density and water supply. These data were, respectively, extracted from the Sistema de Informação de Agravos de Notificação (SINAN), the website of Programa das Nações Unidas para o Desenvolvimento (PNUD), Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE) and Sistema Nacional de Informações sobre Saneamento (SNIS). The results showed that it was not possible to detect impact on the strategy of mosquito release in the municipalities analyzed. To evaluate the robustness of this result, we also used the synthetic control method of Brodersen et al. (2015), which confirmed previous results.