The Text Mining Technique Applied to the Analysis of Health Interventions to Combat Congenital Syphilis in Brazil: The Case of the “Syphilis No!” Project

Abstract

Congenital syphilis (CS) remains a threat to public health worldwide, especially in developing countries. To mitigate the impacts of the CS epidemic, the Brazilian government has developed a national intervention project called “Syphilis No.” Thus, among its range of actions is the production of thousands of writings featuring the experiences of research and intervention supporters (RIS) of the project, called field researchers. In addition, this large volume of base data was subjected to analysis through data mining, which may contribute to better strategies for combating syphilis. Natural language processing is a form of knowledge extraction. First, the database extracted from the “LUES Platform” with 4,874 documents between 2018 and 2020 was employed. This was followed by text preprocessing, selecting texts referring to the field researchers' reports for analysis. Finally, for analyzing the documents, N-grams extraction (N = 2,3,4) was performed. The combination of the TF-IDF metric with the BoW algorithm was applied to assess terms' importance and frequency and text clustering. In total, 1019 field activity reports were mined. Word extraction from the text mining method set out the following guiding axioms from the bigrams: “confronting syphilis in primary health care;” “investigation committee for congenital syphilis in the territory;” “municipal plan for monitoring and investigating syphilis cases through health surveillance;” “women's healthcare networks for syphilis in pregnant;” “diagnosis and treatment with a focus on rapid testing.” Text mining may serve public health research subjects when used in parallel with the conventional content analysis method. The computational method extracted intervention activities from field researchers, also providing inferences on how the strategies of the “Syphilis No” Project influenced the decrease in congenital syphilis cases in the territory.

The relevancy of massive health education in the Brazilian prison system: The course “health care for people deprived of freedom” and its impacts

“…The study by Rocha et al ( 45 ) reinforces such an idea and presents quanti- and qualitative data to show that intervention actions in priority municipalities have set the syphilis issue in the public health agenda, and these actions occurred even under an epidemic. This aspect also helps explain the trend of increased enrollment in the ASPPL course during the COVID-19 pandemic.…”

“…According to Rocha et al ( 45 ), Pinto et al ( 46 , 47 ), and Valentim et al ( 26 ), this phenomenon is explained by the SNP interventions, both in the dimensions of health communication and health education. The authors evidenced associations between public health interventions, increased testing uptake, and a decline in syphilis infections in Brazil, particularly congenital syphilis cases.…”

“…As a result, for the first time in over 30 years, the topic of syphilis was included in the national public health agenda, a fact that mobilized several initiatives through a national pact (interfederative actions between the Union, States, and Municipalities). Syphilis in Brazil stopped being a neglected disease after at least three decades ( 45 ).…”

Clinical Protocols and Treatment Guidelines for the Management of Maternal and Congenital Syphilis in Brazil and Portugal: Analysis and Comparisons: A Narrative Review

“…In Brazil, the average detection rate of MS in 2020 was 21.6 cases per 1000 live births (against 20.8 cases in 2019); and for CS, 7.7 per 1000 live births (against 8.5 in 2019) [ 4 , 64 ]. These results were observed after the “Syphilis No!…”

“…Syphilis is a systemic infection caused by Treponema pallidum subspecies pallidum ( T. pallidum ), a human pathogenic bacterium [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 ]. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates nearly 6 million new infections globally each year, with prevalence highest among people aged 15–49 years [ 6 , 7 ].…”