Por que não conseguimos vencer a dengue? Um estudo de representações sociais

Abstract

Dengue is a viral disease that has affected thousands of individuals for years. Without a specific treatment or vaccine that broadly serves the population, health education becomes essential for controlling this disease. The campaigns and information provided by the media (traditional and non-traditional) focus on preventive actions to control Aedes aegypti, reducing the image of the disease to this vector. The dispersion of this information contributes to the formation of Social Representations about dengue in different social groups, which determine people's attitudes and behaviors at confronting the disease disease. Aim to analyze the social representations of professionals from the Family Health Strategy and the population regarding dengue. This is a social health research, exploratory with a qualitative approach and also online documentary carried out in 3 stages. In the first, interviews were made with 33 professionals and 35 users from 5 teams of the Family Health Strategy in a small municipality in the interior of the state of SP. The interviews were carried out using the IRAMUTEQ Software. The constructed classes were analyzed using the Thematic Analysis technique in light of the General Theory of Social Representations. In the second stage, of an online documentary nature, information disseminated on the social network, Facebook of the Ministry of Health and the City Hall about dengue and/or Aedes aegypti from November 2022 to May 2023 and November 2023 to May 2023 was analyzed. 2024, period of greatest rainfall. In the third stage, the interviews and the products conveyed were analyzed in an articulated way. The research was approved by CEP/UFSCar. The interviews with health professionals gave rise to 2 subcorpora: Prevention actions and dengue and everyday experiences, divided into 5 classes. Those of users, subcorpus 1, Signs and symptoms of the disease and subcorpus 2, Dengue in the community, divided into 6 classes. The information published on Facebook by the City Hall, Ministry of Health (MS1 and MS2), also formed 2 subcorpora for each analysis. City Hall, subcorpus 1: Information on the number of cases and subcorpus 2: Aedes Prevention, divided into 2 classes; MS1, subcorpus 1: Aedes aegypti Prevention Actions and subcorpus 2: Increase in the number of cases and the importance of adequate care, were divided into 7 classes; MS2, subcorpus 1: State actions to control dengue and subcopus 2: Vector and mortality prevention actions, divided into 5 classes. The main guidelines from government bodies are related to the vector and the intra- and per-household elimination of specific water deposits (gutters, plant pots and plates, gutters, water tanks) and the dissemination of signs and symptoms. Institutional discourse is present in the social imagination of health professionals and users, reproducing the same information. The mass media and institutional discourse influence the SR of health professionals and users. Both social groups have anchored vector prevention actions in the campaign/health model and the disease in the biomedical model. For both groups interviewed, there is a lack of information about the vector and the disease. Furthermore, they do not consider the macrostructural factors that contribute to the maintenance of dengue in Brazil. The information published by the MS is only informational and vertical, which does not favor popular participation and also disregards the needs of the communities and the activities carried out within the assigned territories are fragmented and disjointed with the reality of individuals. For all these reasons, the need for education in STS is emphasized so that the construction of knowledge and the resolution of problems is collective.