Análisis de los métodos de interpolación en la distribución espacial de los contaminantes ozono y material particulado menor a 10 micras y su relación con enfermedades alérgicas en niños de 3 a 5 años de edad en el área urbana de la ciudad de Cuenca

Abstract

In recent years in the city of Cuenca, industrial activities, construction, and the automotive park have generated an increase in atmospheric pollutant concentrations, causing health problems especially in children to represent a vulnerable population, impacting on diseases such as diseases allergic and increased hypersensitivity to inhaled aeroallergens in the environment. Given that geographic information systems (GIS) represent a fundamental tool for the assessment of air pollution through spatial interpolation. The present investigation determines the method of interpolation that best fits the spatial distribution of the pollutants ozone (O3) and particulate material less than 10 microns (PM10) and its relationship with allergic diseases in children from 3 to 5 years of age. The validation and comparison of the methods allowed us to conclude that the method of inverse distance weighting (IDW), which is an exact and deterministic method, has better results in the estimation of concentrations, compared to Kriging, which is a geostatistical method, a coefficient was obtained of Pearson correlation (r) of 0.6 for O3 and 0.64 for PM10, determining that IDW presents better behavior with atmospheric pollutants. In addition, it was identified that 32% of the study population has a hypersensitivity reaction in the application of skin tests to inhalants, with 52% being the highest percentage of positive reports belonging to the female gender, however no significant relationship was found between contaminants atmospheric with the prevalence of allergic diseases.