Determining factors associated with vaccination coverage in the first year of life in Brazil (2013-2022).

Access to vaccination has emerged as a growing global public health concern; however, there has been limited research on characteristics of local governments that are associated with vaccination coverage. The objective of this study was to evaluate predictors of vaccination coverage in Brazil for the first year of life between 2013 and 2022. We focused on variables pertaining to the available resources of local governments and their investments in infrastructure and human resources in the health sector. We used binomial generalized linear mixed models to estimate the association of these variables with vaccination coverage in Brazilian municipalities. Our results show that municipalities with better fiscal capacity were more effective in delivering vaccines. Municipalities that rely more on federal and state resources had lower vaccination coverage. Additionally, investment in health professionals was often negatively correlated with vaccination coverage. The study underscores the importance of better understanding the relationship between local government characteristics and vaccination coverage, particularly in regions where local governments are responsible for vaccine delivery.

Wildfire exposure and academic performance in Brazil: A causal inference approach for spatiotemporal data.

As the frequency and intensity of wildfires are projected to globally amplify due to climate change, there is a growing need to quantify the impact of exposure to wildfires in vulnerable populations such as adolescents. In our study, we applied rigorous causal inference methods to estimate the effect of wildfire exposure on the academic performance of high school students in Brazil between 2009 and 2015. Using longitudinal data from 8,183 high schools across 1,571 municipalities in Brazil, we estimated that the average performance in most academic subjects decreases under interventions that increase wildfire exposure, e.g., a decrease of 1.8 % (p = 0.01) in the natural sciences when increasing the wildfire density from 0.0035 wildfires/km2 (first quantile in the sample) to 0.0222 wildfires/km2 (third quartile). Furthermore, these effects considerably worsened over time. Our findings highlight the adverse impact of wildfires on educational outcomes.