Expenses with Epidemiological Surveillance in the Municipalities of Santa Catarina

Abstract

Limitation of resources and social prioritization have led public health care to be guided by several debates. However, governments’ choices can often follow individual priorities, as advocated by the public choice theory, especially in the epidemic area, which is strongly influenced by panic and the media. Therefore, the objective here is to analyze the efficiency of public resources applied in epidemiological surveillance in the mitigation of diseases such as AIDS, Dengue fever and Influenza. By means of descriptive statistics, correlation and panel data regression, 240 observations are analyzed in 60 municipalities in the Brazilian state of Santa Catarina for four years. The results indicate that the expenditures explain the occurrences of AIDS and Influenza in the opposite direction to that suggested by the literature (the more expenditures, the more cases of these diseases). On the other hand, cases of the three diseases increase epidemiological costs. Therefore, public administrators’ choices seem to be directed more towards treatment than towards disease prevention, which goes against the Brazilian Unified Health Care System’s precepts, increases the risks of epidemics and can aggravate the crisis in public health care. The discussions demonstrate possible occasional factors such as the lack of temporality in feeding the system and distortions regarding the place of incidence of the cases, which can also lead public administrators to make wrong decisions or diverge from those expected by their voters.