"Hanseníase: o que está sendo "eliminado"?"

Abstract

Although WHO declared in 2005 that leprosy was no longer a global public health problem, several countries remain hyperendemic for the disease. This is the case of Brazil, which has the highest world prevalence and the second largest absolute number of cases of the disease, behind only India. Many researchers fear that this WHO statement will lead to a decrease in the promotion of leprosy research, which would lead to a reduction in scientific production in the area and the possibility of new epidemiological outbreak of the disease. This work aimed to carry out a scientometric analysis of the academic productions on leprosy, from 1997 to 2016, in the Web of Science (ISI) research portal. The search terms "M * leprae" OR "leprosy" were used. The searches were refined by "document types" and "Web of Science categories". GraphPad Prism 05 software was used to sort and analyze the data. They were reported, during the 20 years analyzed, 6031 published works on leprosy. A drop in scientific production could be observed until 2006, followed by a rise trend between 2011 and 2016. However, when a direct relationship is made between the total amount of work available in the ISI, year by year, and total published articles on leprosy, there is a clear downward trend over the 20 years analyzed. The work also shows a reduction in the amount of work produced by the US and European countries, which were the sites that most developed the leading research in the area of leprosy. The analysis shows that the decrease in funding may actually have affected the scientific production of the area, since a country does not only science with financial investment in scientists and laboratories, they are necessary, but they are not enough. One way to balance success in the results of large-scale scientific research would be to define national or even international policies to foster science and long-term research. In the case of leprosy that has a long history, it is believed that a proposal in this sense would maintain the ranking of researches and productions on the subject at a satisfactory level.