International Journal of Community Medicine and Public Health | February 2020 | Vol 7 | Issue 2 Page 431 International Journal of Community Medicine and Public Health de Sousa CVL et al. Int J Community Med Public Health. 2020 Feb;7(2):431-436 http://www.ijcmph.com pISSN 2394-6032 | eISSN 2394-6040 Original Research Article Vulnerability to infectious and contagious diseases in daycare center teachers: an observational study Cicero V. L. de Sousa 1 , Flávia de S. Gehrke 2 , Beatriz da C. A. Alves 1 , Glaucia R. L. da Veiga 1 , Ligia A. Azzalis 3 , Fernando Adami 1 , Fernando L. A. Fonseca 1 * INTRODUCTION The risks caused by infectious and contagious diseases in the school environment are of importance to the conduct of early childhood education in the contemporary world. Sociopolitical, economic and cultural transformations experienced by women and families since the nineteenth century with the Industrial Revolution and compounded during the last century have definitively engendered women's entry into the workforce. 1,2 Early childhood education, or in the first years of life, is experiencing a growing expansion in distinct strata of society, with an increase in educational institutions, since children need to attend school at an increasingly earlier age. In this way, women and families share the care and education of their young children with daycare centers and pre-school. In this context, the teachers in daycare centers play a fundamental role, to the extent that the current society considers and seeks these schools as places of care and education of very young children, and therefore it is necessary to provide adequate working and health conditions so that they may carry out their work as educators/caregivers. 1 ABSTRACT Background: The risks caused by infectious and contagious diseases in the school environment are of importance to the conduct of early childhood education in the contemporary world. In this work authors aimed to analyze vulnerability to infectious and contagious diseases in daycare center teachers who work in public institutions in the Municipality of Fortaleza-CE, Brazil. Methods: This was aquanti-qualitative study approach of the descriptive, cross-sectional type, of an exploratory nature. This study was carried out with 30 daycare center teachers from the Municipality of Fortaleza from October to November 2016. Results: The main infectious and contagious diseases that affect children in the daycare center were high rates of two or three comorbidities per child. Regarding the workplace risk to the teachers’ health, 58.6% of the teachers consider that the working in the daycare center does not bring greater risks of illness and 41.4% believe it does. Conclusions: Stress due to the presence of students with viral infections who need to remain in the daycare center, lack of hygiene, rest and inadequate nutrition contribute to the vulnerability to illnesses in the teachers. Keywords: Contagious diseases, Daycare Center, Infectious diseases, Teacher, Teaching Work, Vulnerability 1 Faculdade de Medicina do ABC, Santo André, SP, Brazil 2 Universidade Paulista, São Paulo, SP, Brazil 3 Universidade Federal de São Paulo, Diadema, SP, Brazil Received: 18 June 2019 Revised: 22 July 2019 Accepted: 25 July 2019 *Correspondence: Dr. Fernando L.A. Fonseca, E-mail: profferfonseca@gmail.com Copyright: © the author(s), publisher and licensee Medip Academy. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.18203/2394-6040.ijcmph20200410