Computer Science Applications, Computational Theory and Mathematics, Computational Mathematics, Epidemiology
13
Scopus Publications
Scopus Publications
HTLV-1 and Pregnancy: A Retrospective Study of Maternal and Neonatal Health Outcomes in an Endemic Region of Brazil Jacielma de Oliveira Freire, Maria Aparecida Figueredo Rodrigues, Greice Carolina Santos da Silva, Hugo Saba Pereira Cardoso, Marcio Luis Valença Araújo, Aloísio Santos Nascimento Filho, Briena Rodrigues Santos, Maria da Conceição Chagas de Almeida, Bernardo Galvão-Castro, Maria Fernanda Rios Grassi Pathogens, 2025 Human T-cell lymphotropic virus type 1 (HTLV-1) infection poses significant challenges to maternal and neonatal health, particularly in endemic regions. Vertical transmission, which occurs most commonly through prolonged breastfeeding and rarely during pregnancy, or childbirth, perpetuates the virus within families. This observational, retrospective study analyzed HTLV-1-infected and uninfected pregnant women admitted for delivery at a university maternity hospital in Salvador, Brazil (2020–2022). Medical records provided sociodemographic, clinical, and laboratory data. The HTLV-1 infection rate was 4.61 per 1000 deliveries. The sociodemographic characteristics were similar between infected (n = 17) and uninfected (n = 34) women. HTLV-1-positive women had higher rates of unplanned and undesired pregnancies. Adverse pregnancy outcomes were frequent in both groups (94.1% vs. 91.2%), but metabolic disorders and hypertension/eclampsia were more common among the infected women. Preterm birth and postpartum complications were also more frequent (17.6% vs. 5.9%, respectively), although the difference was not statistically significant. Breastfeeding initiation within the first hours of life was lower among exposed newborns (28.6% vs. 70%; p = 0.013). Neonatal characteristics did not differ significantly between the groups. These findings highlight critical gaps in reproductive health awareness and barriers to accessing preventive interventions. Further research on therapeutic strategies is urgently needed to support the World Health Organization’s (WHO) goal of eliminating HTLV-1 vertical transmission by 2030.
The Potential Related to Microgeneration of Renewable Energy in Urban Spaces and Its Impact on Urban Planning Hugo Saba, Filipe Cardoso Brito, Rafael Guimarães Oliveira dos Santos, Toni Alex Reis Borges, Raíssa Silva Fernandes, Márcio Luís Valenca Araujo, Eduardo Manuel de Freitas Jorge, Roberta Mota Panizio, Paulo Brito, Paulo Ferreira, Aloísio Santos Nascimento Filho Energies, 2024 This research aims to explore the potential of renewable energy sources in urban planning, focusing on microgeneration technologies, through a structured literature review. A systematic review was conducted using the PRISMA method, encompassing the identification, selection, eligibility, and analysis of studies related to renewable energy microgeneration in urban environments. The findings emphasize key areas such as policy development, energy security, and future scenario projections, with a particular focus on solar energy generation. The review highlights the importance of robust regulatory frameworks and monitoring systems for effectively managing prosumers and ensuring equitable energy distribution. Key challenges identified include the intermittency of renewable energy sources, regulatory complexities, monitoring systems, prosumer management, energy sizing risks, and the lifecycle of microgeneration technologies. The research accentuates the need for outstanding collaboration between academia, industry, and urban planners to accelerate the adoption and implementation of renewable energy solutions. The main conclusion is that such collaboration is essential for addressing challenges, driving innovation, and contributing to the development of sustainable urban energy systems.
Fatal Oropouche Virus Infections in Nonendemic Region, Brazil, 2024 Antonio Carlos Bandeira, Felicidade Mota Pereira, Arabela Leal, Sara P.O. Santos, Ana Claudia Barbosa, Marcia Sao Pedro Leal Souza, Daniele Ribeiro de Souza, Natalia Guimaraes, Vagner Fonseca, Marta Giovanetti, Luiz Carlos Junior Alcantara, André Alvarez A. Lessa, Ramon Costa Saavedra, Luiz Marcelo R. Tomé, Felipe Campos M. Iani, Rivia Mary Barros, Sandra Maria O. Purificação, Jaciara Prado de Jesus, Ricardo Rosário Fonseca, Marcio Luis Valença Araújo Emerging Infectious Diseases, 2024 We report acute Oropouche virus infections in 2 previously healthy women from a nonendemic region of Brazil outside the Amazon Basin. Infections rapidly progressed to hemorrhagic manifestations and fatal outcomes in 4–5 days. These cases highlight the critical need for enhanced surveillance to clarify epidemiology of this neglected disease.
Complex network analysis of arboviruses in the same geographic domain: Differences and similarities Eslaine S. Santos, José G.V. Miranda, Hugo Saba, Lacita M. Skalinski, Marcio L.V. Araújo, Rafael V. Veiga, Maria da Conceição N. Costa, Luciana L. Cardim, Enny S. Paixão, Maria Glória Teixeira, Roberto F.S. Andrade, Maurício L. Barreto Chaos Solitons and Fractals, 2023 Arbovirus can cause diseases with a broad spectrum from mild to severe and long-lasting symptoms, affecting humans worldwide and therefore considered a public health problem with global and diverse socio-economic impacts. Understanding how they spread within and across different regions is necessary to devise strategies to control and prevent new outbreaks. Complex network approaches have widespread use to get important insights on several phenomena, as the spread of these viruses within a given region. This work uses the motif-synchronization methodology to build time varying complex networks based on data of registered infections caused by Zika, chikungunya, and dengue virus from 2014 to 2020, in 417 cities of the state of Bahia, Brazil. The resulting network sets capture new information on the spread of the diseases that are related to the time delay in the synchronization of the time series among different municipalities. Thus the work adds new and important network-based insights to previous results based on dengue dataset in the period 2001-2016. The most frequent synchronization delay time between time series in different cities, which control the insertion of edges in the networks, ranges 7 to 14 days, a period that is compatible with the time of the individual-mosquito-individual transmission cycle of these diseases. As the used data covers the initial periods of the first Zika and chikungunya outbreaks, our analyses reveal an increasing monotonic dependence between distance among cities and the time delay for synchronization between the corresponding time series. The same behavior was not observed for dengue, first reported in the region back in 1986, either in the previously 2001-2016 based results or in the current work. These results show that, as the number of outbreaks accumulates, different strategies must be adopted to combat the dissemination of arbovirus infections.
Synchronized spread of COVID-19 in the cities of Bahia, Brazil Hugo Saba, A.S. Nascimento Filho, José G.V. Miranda, Raphael S. Rosário, Thiago B. Murari, Eduardo M.F. Jorge, Elaine C.B. Cambui, Márcia S.P.L. Souza, Ana C.F.N. Silva, Márcio L.V. Araújo Epidemics, 2022 The COVID-19 pandemic, caused by the highly transmissible SARS-CoV-2 virus, has overloaded health systems in many contexts Conant and Wolfe (2008). Brazil has experienced more than 345,000 deaths, as of April/2021 Conant and Wolfe (2008), with dire consequences for the country's public and private health systems. This paper aims to estimate the synchronization graph between the cities' contagion waves from public COVID-19 data records. For this purpose, the Motif-Synchronization method Magwire et al. (2011) was applied to publicly available COVID-19 data records to determine the sequential relationship of occurrence of the waves among Bahia's cities. We find synchronization between waves of infection between cities, suggesting diffusion of the disease in Bahia and a potential role for inter-city transportation Saba et al. (2018), Saba et al. (2014), Araújo et al. (2018) in the dynamics of this phenomenon McKee and Stuckler (2020), Chinazzi et al. (2020), Tizzoni et al. (2014). Our main contribution lies in the use of the Motif-Synchronization method applied to COVID-19 data records, with the results revealing a pattern of disease spread that extends beyond city boundaries.
A Critical Analysis of the COVID-19 Hospitalization Network in Countries with Limited Resources Marcio L. V. Araujo, José G. V. Miranda, Rodrigo N. Vasconcelos, Elaine C. B. Cambui, Raphael S. Rosário, Márcio C. F. Macedo, Antonio C. Bandeira, Márcia S. P. L. Souza, Ana C. F. N. Silva, Aloisio S. Nascimento Filho, Thiago B. Murari, Eduardo M. F. Jorge, Hugo Saba International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2022 To effectively combat the COVID-19 pandemic, countries with limited resources could only allocate intensive and non-intensive care units to a low number of regions. In this work, we evaluated the actual displacement of infected patients in search of care, aiming to understand how the networks of planned and actual hospitalizations take place. To assess the flow of hospitalizations outside the place of residence, we used the concepts of complex networks. Our findings indicate that the current distribution of health facilities in Bahia, Brazil, is not sufficient to effectively reduce the distances traveled by patients with COVID-19 who require hospitalization. We believe that unnecessary trips to distant hospitals can put both the sick and the healthy involved in the transport process at risk, further delaying the stabilization of the COVID-19 pandemic in each region of the state of Bahia. From the results found, we concluded that, to mitigate this situation, the implementation of health units in countries with limited resources should be based on scientific methods, and international collaborations should be established.
Analysis of hydrous ethanol price competitiveness after the implementation of the Fossil fuel import price parity policy in Brazil Aloisio S. Nascimento Filho, Hugo Saba, Rafael G. O. dos Santos, João Gabriel A. Calmon, Marcio L. V. Araújo, Eduardo M. F. Jorge, Thiago B. Murari Sustainability Switzerland, 2021 Competition is a relevant element in any open economy. Public policies are necessary to induce economic efficiency and to create conditions to preserve or stimulate a competitive environment. This paper aims to assess the competitiveness of hydrous ethanol price in a period of political, social and economic crises, in 15 Brazilian state capitals between the years 2012 and 2019. We compared the ethanol–gasoline price ratio behavior in two different periods, before and after the import parity price policy implemented by Petrobras in 2016. Mann–Whitney and Levene’s tests, two non-parametric statistical methods, were applied to verify significant changes between these periods. The implementation of changes in Petrobras’ pricing policy from 2016 onwards caused a statistically significant increase in the ratio coefficient of variation in two-thirds of the distribution market and more than the half of analyzed retail markets. Second, overall, the cities that showed statistically significant changes in the median and coefficient of variation in the distribution market price ratio were followed by the retail market. Our findings suggest that government interventions in the fuel and byproduct final selling prices to distributors negatively impact competition between companies that are part of the fuel distribution and retail chain, also affecting the sale of biofuels in Brazil and discouraging the initiatives to use renewable fuels to reduce the emission of pollutants.
Scaling effect in COVID-19 spreading: The role of heterogeneity in a hybrid ODE-network model with restrictions on the inter-cities flow José Garcia Vivas Miranda, Mateus Souza Silva, José Gabriel Bertolino, Rodrigo Nogueira Vasconcelos, Elaine Cristina Barbosa Cambui, Marcio Luis Valença Araújo, Hugo Saba, Diego Pereira Costa, Soltan Galano Duverger, Matheus Teles de Oliveira, Hildebrando Simões de Araújo Neto, Washington de Jesus Sant’anna Franca-Rocha, Daniel Cardoso Pereira Jorge, Juliane Fonseca de Oliveira, Roberto Fernandes Silva Andrade, Rafael Silva do Rosário Physica D Nonlinear Phenomena, 2021
Correlation between hospitalized patients' demographics, symptoms, comorbidities, and COVID-19 pandemic in Bahia, Brazil Márcio C. F. Macedo, Isabelle M. Pinheiro, Caio J. L. Carvalho, Hilda C. J. R. Fraga, Isaac P. C. Araujo, Simone S. Montes, Otávio A. C. Araujo, Lucas A. Alves, Hugo Saba, Márcio L. V. Araújo, Ivonete T. L. Queiroz, Romilson L. Sampaio, Márcia S. P. L. Souza, Ana Claudia F. N. da Silva, Antonio C. S. Souza Plos One, 2020 In this paper, we provide a retrospective cohort study with patients that have been hospitalized for general or intensive care unit admission due to COVID-19, between March 3 and July 29, 2020, in the state of Bahia, Brazil. We aim to correlate those patients’ demographics, symptoms and comorbidities, with the risk of mortality from COVID-19, length of hospital stay, and time from diagnosis to definitive outcome. On the basis of a dataset provided by the Health Secretary of the State of Bahia, we selected 3,896 hospitalized patients from a total of 154,868 COVID-19 patients that included non-hospitalized patients and patients with invalid registration in the dataset. Then, we statistically analyzed whether there was a significant correlation between the patient record data and the COVID-19 pandemic, and our main findings reinforced by the use of a multivariable logistic regression were that older age (Odds Ratio [OR] = 1.03, 95% Confidence Interval [CI] = 1.03-1.04, p-value (p) <0.001), an initial symptom of shortness of breath (OR = 1.88, 95% CI = 1.60-2.20, p < 0.001), and the presence of comorbidities, mainly chronic kidney disease (OR = 2.41, 95% CI = 1.67-3.48, p < 0.001) are related to an increased risk of mortality from COVID-19. On the other hand, sore throat (OR = 0.74, 95% CI = 0.58-0.95, p = 0.02) and length of hospital stay (OR = 0.96, 95% CI = 0.58-0.95, p < 0.001) are more related to a reduced risk of mortality from COVID-19. Moreover, a multivariable linear regression conducted with statistically significant variables (p < 0.05) showed that age (OR = 0.97, 95% CI = 0.95-0.98, p < 0.001) and time from diagnosis to definitive outcome (OR = 1.67, 95% CI = 1.64-1.71, p < 0.001) are associated with the length of hospital stay.
Nonlocal dispersal of dengue in the state of Bahia Marcio Luis Valença Araújo, José Garcia Vivas Miranda, Renelson Sampaio, Marcelo A. Moret, Raphael S. Rosário, Hugo Saba Science of the Total Environment, 2018
