Dr. Francisco Antonio Bezerra Coutinho
School of Medicine University of Sao Paulo, Brazil
Title: Modeling and Restoring a defective data base on Hepatitis C
Biography
Biography: Dr. Francisco Antonio Bezerra Coutinho
Abstract
Notification of cases of hepatitis C is compulsory in Brazil. So the Brazilian Ministry of Health has a large Data Base with the number of notified cases (per year) of hepatitis C, with the age and sex of the patients each year since 2004. This database is called SINAN. This data lists the cases from all the states of Brazil separately. From SINAN we can calculate the reported incidence of hepatitis C and also its prevalence. The problem is that the notification process is not perfect so the data base underestimates the prevalence of Hepatitis C in the country. It is possible however, to model the reasons for the lack of notification and therefore to estimate the real prevalence of hepatitis in Brazil of even for each state of the federation. There are many ways of doing this. In this work, we present only two ways of calculating the prevalence of Hepatitis from the defective reported incidence. The result can be used to design a statistical survey of hepatitis C. Comparing the result of the survey with the result of the model the notification process can be improved.
