Abstract
The city of Guarapari, known as “Healthy City”, has as its main tourist attraction radioactive sands known as monazite sands. There are many studies aimed at quantifying radiation, but little is known about an influence of radiation levels on the life cycle of parasites with zoonotic potential, since many owners take their animals to beaches facilitating a maintenance of their cycle. The objective of the present work was to evaluate the association of the sand radiation of the beaches of the municipality of Guarapari and the presence of eggs and larvae of zoonotic potential parasites. To determine the influence of the radiation on the parasites, sand and faeces samples were collected from the beaches of Praia do Morro, Areia Preta, Castanheiras, Setiba and Santa Mônica, and how to analyze, use the simple centrifugal-flotation technique. The beaches of the present study were classified as low, medium and high radioactivity according to the dose limits that a human being can receive. The samples of sand and faeces were grouped according to a classification of the beaches where they were collected as samples. After obtaining the result, a Chi-square statistical test was performed at a significance level of 95% to evaluate an association between radiation classes and parasite presence. In general, monazitic sands have an influence on the maintenance of the cycle of zoonotic parasites found in beach sand, their correlation being inversely proportional.
Highlights
Guarapari is a municipality that belongs to the Metropolitan Region of Vitória, in the state of Espírito Santo, Brazil, and during high season it receives more than 500 thousand tourists, a quantity that is attracted by the beauty of the beaches as well as by the medicinal power of the municipality’s monazitic sands (Guarapari, 2014)
Setiba, Santa Mônica, Castanheiras and Areia Preta were classified according to the limit of annual dose of radioactivity that a human being can receive in mSv.y-1 being considered low the beach that do not exceed 2.8 mSv.y-1, high those above 50 mSv.y-1 and average those between these values, as these are the limits that human beings can receive from annual radioactivity
In this collection, the value of greater radioactivity found in Santa Monica (0.789 μSv.h-1) was multiplied by the number of hours per year (8760h), we have the equivalent annual dose in mSv.y-1 (Calheiro et al, 2016) which was 6.91 mSv y-1, as it was considered that the highest radiation value found on the beach was constant during the year, a period that has 8760 hours. Another factor for these beaches to have these amounts of radiation is the distance from the Areia Preta beach, since both Bacutia and Santa Mônica have reasonable distance that prevent the movements of the tides from taking the monazitic sands to these beaches, because the tide causes radioactive sand to move from one place to another (Calheiro et al, 2016)
Summary
Guarapari is a municipality that belongs to the Metropolitan Region of Vitória, in the state of Espírito Santo, Brazil, and during high season it receives more than 500 thousand tourists, a quantity that is attracted by the beauty of the beaches as well as by the medicinal power of the municipality’s monazitic sands (Guarapari, 2014).Monazite is a reddish-brown phosphate, and the sands that have this phosphate have a striking characteristic of having a dark tone due to the presence of other minerals such as magnetite, imenite and rutile (Okuno et al, 1982).Since sand is an environment in which many agents have been found as parasites, there is a growing concern with the contamination of spas because these areas are related to recreation. Guarapari is a municipality that belongs to the Metropolitan Region of Vitória, in the state of Espírito Santo, Brazil, and during high season it receives more than 500 thousand tourists, a quantity that is attracted by the beauty of the beaches as well as by the medicinal power of the municipality’s monazitic sands (Guarapari, 2014). Disease outbreaks are closely linked to the peak season, the number of bathers increasing as well as the presence of domestic animals (Barros & Brigitte, 2014). Especially stray animals, can transmit parasitic and infectious diseases (Alves et al, 2013), playing an important epidemiological role in the contamination of public places and in the spread of infections by various types of parasites
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