Matrix of Critical Processes of the Social Determination of Health in the Affectation to the Immune System by Exposure to Pesticides in La Paz, Bolivia

Introduction: Critical epidemiology uses the social determination of health category as a methodological tool, structured in an array of crucial processes. This matrix allows us to understand the complexity of the health object from different dimensions or domains: general, private, and individual, with particular typologies that allow a dialectical relationship between them. Development: The object of study related to the affectation to the immune system, by the use and the greater or lesser chronic exposure to agrochemicals in fruits and vegetables produced by communities in the department of La Paz, Bolivia. Applying critical epidemiology with the matrix of crucial processes, we tried to explain the impacts to the immune system’s innate and adaptive response mechanisms, in an integral and objective way, where also the different levels relate to reality and the processes that intervene in the communities’ ways of life. Conclusions: With the qualitative and quantitative analysis of the variables and indicators of each domain, health is interpreted as a process, and the laboratory results of the immune response cease to be empirically analyzed in their biological cause-effect relationship and became a constituent part of the individual domain, where the mechanisms are affected by the ways of life and the social structure (economic, political, cultural, and geographical).