Proximity to Foci of Contamination and Mortality in Childhood in Early 20th Century Madrid.

Diego Ramiro Fariñas, IEGD-CCHS Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)
Dariya Ordanovich, Spanish National Research Council
Yolanda Casado, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC)
Stanislao Mazzoni, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC)

The link between mortality and pollution has been well established in the literature. Since John Snow’s pioneering work on spatial epidemiology, there has been a vast literature on this subject. However most of the results are based on contemporary data on pollutants and epidemiologic or demographic data. In this article we study the relationship between the quality of the environment and mortality in the first years of life in the city of Madrid at the beginning of the 20th century. Thanks to the availability of individual geo-referenced data from the Historical Population Registry of the City of Madrid and the Historical Spatial Data Infrastructure of Madrid www.idehistoricamadrid.org. After a brief description of the sanitary and environmental context in the city, and the sources used in this analysis, we examined the patterns of mortality in the first years of life in the 1900s and 1920s in Madrid. The main section of this document addresses the measurement of the relevance of specific environmental factors that affect infant and child mortality, through the application of various statistical models and the history of events technique and using spatial analysis to measure how the proximity to foci of contamination affects childhood mortality in early 20th Century Madrid. All models will be controlled through demographic and socioeconomic factors, an opportunity given by the integration of different sources of the time. The document will also be an opportunity to present the first results, based on the survival analysis, for the city of Madrid at the beginning of the 20th century in combination with contextual information on sources of pollution in an urban environment (polluting industries, stables, dairies, etc).

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 16. Spatial Epidemiology