The result of this study triggered a series www.selleckchem.com/products/z-vad-fmk.html of interventions by the federal government in this region including financial, technical, and scientific measures.When data of a town divulges a low prevalence of a specific disease, city planners generally reduce allocated resources and do not continue with control measures. Moreover, health professionals and the general population forget the basic characteristics of the disease, such as the signs and symptoms, and thus, diagnosis is delayed which can facilitate transmission [11].Hence, the aim of this study was to investigate the presence of clusters by means of the residential grouping of people who have or have had leprosy.2. MethodsThis was a population-based, descriptive, cross-sectional, and ecological study.

Four hundred and twenty-five addresses of residents in the municipality from a total of 478 leprosy cases diagnosed in the period from January 1, 1998 to December 30, 2010 and treated as part of the Leprosy Control Program were geocoded after their addresses had been confirmed by home visits.Fifty-three patients were excluded from the study as their addresses were incomplete, nonexistent, or in rural areas or because the patient was not a resident in the municipality.The home visit was exclusively to confirm the address given by the patient. It is important to mention that the municipality is a reference center for 101 neighboring towns; thus, some people from other regions use the address of relatives or acquaintances to attain treatment.

In recent years, this issue has been solved with the checking of national databases such as the National System for Notifiable Diseases (SINAN) which prevents patients from other regions from being included as residents in the city.2.1. Geocodification of DataX and Y coordinates were allocated to confirmed addresses. This process, developed using the MapInfo software, was created from the interpolation of the coordinates of a street compared with the address of the patient. With the longitude and latitude being known, it was possible to export data to another system employed to analyze cases and group those with similar features. The concepts of Burrough [12] were used; the cartographic base is the spatialization of geographical features (point, line, or polygon) with attributes, for example, a street name that has coordinates (X, Y) in a given map projection system [12].

2.2. Spatial Analysis and Statistics of Geographic Data The software CrimeStat, which works with point samples of geocoded data, was used to determine the presence of clusters [13]. The first input parameters are the geographical location of the addresses of leprosy Drug_discovery cases, that is, the latitude and longitude.Two other very important parameters used in the study were the clinical classification of leprosy and year of onset of treatment entered as weight and time, respectively. The weight and the time are values associated with the X and Y positions of each point.