A GEOGRAFIA MÉDICA E AS DOENÇAS INFECTO-PARASITÁRIAS

Abstract

Geography is a science that has as its objective the study of the earth surface, the landscape, the individuality of places, the spaces, man and environment relations and society, and nature relations. A different conception of Geography will be approached in this study. It deals with medical Geography which has as its objective the study of the Geography of diseases, in the light of the geographic knowledge, and the distribution and prevalence of those diseases in the earth surface. Medical Geography started with Hippocrates - with medicine history - when in 480 b.C the relation between environment agents and diseases had been already shown. This theory prevailed for more than two thousand years concerning to endemic and epidemic diseases. In the last decades of the nineteen century Medical Geography underwent to a decline with the introduction of the unicausality theory, which argued that once diseases specific etiologic agents were identified as well as their means of transmission, the prevention problems and also the disease heeling would be solved. For that reason works on Medical Geography were only published after 1900 although without much importance. Unicausality theory had its crisis started between the 1930s and 1950s when the concept of multicausality came back to the academy. According to the concept the disease is a process that occurs because of severalcauses such as physical, chemical, biological, environmental, social, economical psychological and cultural agents. For that reason Medical Geography intends to understand the organization process of the geographic space done by human society in the different times and places. The comprehension of this process is very important as it allows us to understand the role of geographic space organization in the genesis and in the disease distribution, so we can establish Health Environmental Vigilance programs.