Avaliação do conhecimento dos proprietários de cães e/ou gatos sobre leishmaniose e georreferenciamento dos casos positivos atendidos no Hospital Veterinário Universitário da UFSM

Abstract

The Visceral Leishmaniasis, currently, is one of the main vector-borne diseases in Brazil and of great importance in Public Health, since it is a zoonosis of high morbidity and lethality. The etiological agent of Leishmaniasis is Leishmania sp., whose transmission occurs through the bite of a sandfly, popularly known as the straw mosquito, belonging to the genus Lutzomyia. This research project aimed to assess the knowledge of the guardian population of dogs and / or cats about Leishmaniasis and perform the georeferencing of positive cases treated at University Veterinary Hospital of Santa Maria. For this, an online questionnaire was conducted, anonymously, on the Cognito Forms platform, focusing on the entire Brazilian territory, containing 20 multiple-choice questions for qualitative analysis. The georeferencing of positive cases was carried out using the QGIS application, a free software with open source, multiplatform geographic information system that allows the viewing, editing and analysis of georeferenced data. In 2019 and 2020, 40 positive cases were diagnosed at the University Veterinary Hospital, all of which were dogs, and of these, 28 cases resided in the city of Santa Maria. With the georeferencing, it was possible to identify that the Camobi, Nossa Senhora das Dores, Centro and Passo da Areia neighborhoods were the places with the highest incidence of positive cases. In the online questionnaire, a total of 425 responses were obtained, with a predominance of 77% of the female audience (n = 326), 53% young people between 19 and 30 years old (n = 226), 35% with family income between 2 and 3 minimum wages (n = 147) and the percentage of participants who consider they have no knowledge about the disease is consistent with 27% of responses (n = 114). Thus, it can be concluded that the incidence of positive cases is influenced by the location of a first focus of transmission, making early diagnosis and prevention and control measures of paramount importance. There is still a lot of information support from the city government, because even with the prevalence of participants with a higher level of education, the prevalence of people who consider they have no knowledge about the disease is still very high.