Biological disasters and their relation to public health: an analysis of articles published in the State of Paraná, Brazil

Abstract

This study emphasizes the relationship between biological disasters and public health through the systematization of the articles produced by institutions of the State of Paraná in the last few decades. These were selected using key words defined in Codar and Cobrade in the Journal Portals of the Capes, Web of Science, Scopus, PubMed, Redulac, Spell, SciELO, Medline and Bireme databases. As a result, 318 articles were located from 1970 onwards, with a peak in 2012. Within the areas of knowledge published on the subject, 29% of the articles are linked to health sciences, followed by 28% related to agrarian sciences. In the analysis of the language most used, although the English language was universal, Portuguese was predominant in most articles (84%). With respect to disaster phases, more than 90% of the publications are on disaster risk management, with a small amount of works on the biological disaster per se. Finally, in the comparison of the key words of the articles over the ensuing years, the key word most mentioned is leishmaniasis, with the bulk of mentions between 2001 and 2010. This study showed that the areas are integrated, although there is a difficulty in correlation between issues such as disasters and the spread of diseases.

Key words
Biological disaster; Public health; Natural disasters; Risk management; Health promotion