[Epidemiology of burns in mayotte in 2022: an exhaustive study on a particular health area].

Abstract

The last French department, created in 2011, Mayotte still lacks its integration into official health statistics, making it difficult to adapt care facilities to needs, as well as planning for prevention. We conducted a retrospective epidemiological study including all patients treated in the Mayotte burns unit between February 1^st, 2022 and January 31^st, 2023 (339 patients). We first studied burn patients on the island, i.e. 300 people. The average age is 10.7 years with 75% of patients under 12 years old. The overall incidence rate is 100/100,000 inhabitants, which seems higher than in the other departments, but 16/100,000 among hospitalized patients only, a figure comparable with the metropolitan level. Burns are most often caused by scalding (82.7%), affect a low surface <10% (91%) and are partial thickness (66.7%). Low-income people are over-represented in the burned population, due to very degraded housing conditions. The other group (39 cases) are patients burned in the Comoros and treated in Mayotte after an average delay of 10 days following the incident. The burns are significantly more extensive (TBSA 16.6% vs. 4.6%), deeper (full thickness 66.7 vs. 2.0%) and caused by flames (66.7% vs. 10.7%). They are more often hospitalized (71.8% vs. 16%), for a total of 608 days in the unit compared to 480 days for the other 300 patients. The Mayotte burns unit must therefore take care of both a particularly precarious local population and an external population suffering from especially serious burns.