A The AIDS epidemic among women living in Campinas has shown significant growth in the last decade. In the period between 1996 and 2005, the number of cases reached 1.023, while in the first fifteen years – from 1980 to 1995 – records totaled 207. Another issue was the appearance of clusters of cases, called clusters, in the northwest, southwest and south, which means a marked occurrence of the disease in low-income neighborhoods.

The disease is present in all regions of Campinas

“'Feminization' happened simultaneously with the 'pauperization' of the AIDS epidemic in the city. The cases are concentrated in areas with populations of greatest need and low income, more specifically, on the axes of Amoreiras and John Boyd Dunlop avenues and also Rodovia Santos Dumont”, highlights public health doctor Carlos Henn, who carried out a study at the Faculty of Medical Sciences from Unicamp (FCM).

In his master's thesis, supervised by professor Maria Rita Donalisio Cordeiro, Carlos Henn took as a basis 4.175 addresses of individuals over 13 years of age reported with AIDS, that is, 90% of the cases registered by the Epidemiological Surveillance of the Municipal Health Department in the period between 1980 to 2005. Maps of the spatial distribution of the disease in the city show an increase in AIDS in both males and females over 13 years of age. In this sense, it progressively reaches all regions, from the most centralized and urbanized areas to the periphery of the five health districts east, north, northwest, southwest and south.

Another aspect deserves to be highlighted in the study: the disease among those over 50 years of age also showed an increase in incidence by more than two times. There were 91 cases observed between 1996 and 2000, compared to 202 from 2001 to 2005. In these cases, the concentration occurs in two main axes of the map, central-west and central-south, but also with clusters in territories of the five health regions. “The situation precisely identifies the aging of the epidemic in the municipality”, he explains.

For the public health doctor, understanding the HIV and AIDS epidemic in its different socioeconomic, cultural, biological, political dimensions, among others, still represents a major challenge for Public Health in more than 20 years of the disease in the country and around the world. . According to him, when considering the natural history of the disease, it is believed that HIV was introduced into the country in the 70s, spreading in an insidious and progressive manner throughout the national territory. At the beginning of the 1980s, the profile of the epidemic was predominant in the male, homosexual population, with high education, belonging to the middle and upper class, residents of urbanized and centralized areas of the municipality.

The master's thesis, however, shows that the current dynamics of the epidemic in Campinas affects populations in their “habitat” differently. “It is characterized by the trends of 'heterosexualization', 'feminization', 'pauperization' and, more recently, 'aging', affecting older age groups, concentrating on marginalized and vulnerable populations”, he highlights.