Malaria is an infectious disease, where the parasite, Plasmodium, infects mosquitos, and then infects humans through a mosquito bite. In 2019, there were over 229 million cases of malaria worldwide with children under the age of 5 being the most vulnerable. Risk factors for children under five include not sleeping underneath a mosquito net, having a lower education, and the type of household. Most cases and deaths happened in the sub-Saharan region of Africa, including Sierra Leone. The aim of this project was to study the prevalence and malarial factors that are associated with children under the age of five sleeping underneath mosquito nets at night in Sierra Leone in 2019. Data was extracted from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) Program in the Standard DHS for Children’s recode 2019. SPSS Statistics was used to conduct analysis. This cross-sectional study focused on the prevalence of children under five sleeping underneath a mosquito net, which is the outcome variable. The explanatory variables included type of mosquito net slept under, region, place of residence, and fever in the last two weeks. The first part of the results focused on descriptive tests, finding the frequency and percentage of each variable. Then chi-squared tests were performed between the outcome and explanatory variables, determining the test statistic, p-value, and degrees of freedom. The sample size was 9,899 responses. For the frequency results of the explanatory variables, with missing values excluded, majority of responses lived in the Southern region (n=2,591; 25.5%), lived in a rural area (n=6,873; 69.4%), had children under five sleep under treated nets (n=5,271; 63.4%), and did not have a fever in the last two weeks (n=7,418; 81.8%). The frequency results of the outcome variable were that majority of responses had all their children under five sleep under a mosquito net (n=5,278; 56.6%). There was significant association between children under 5 sleeping underneath a mosquito net with type of net (p<0.001), region (p<0.001), place of residence (p<0.0001), and fever in the last two weeks (p=0.006). One limitation of this study was that it doesn’t ask participants if they had malaria, therefore, variables were chosen based on that they can be used as a surrogate for malaria. Even though, the whole country is endemic to malaria, the Southern region could potentially have the highest cases of malaria, since most responses lived in that region and had many children sleeping under nets. Also, the majority of responses did not have a fever in the last two weeks, and this could be due to having a mosquito net in place to reduce the risk of malaria. In conclusion, studying malaria variables and the possible relationship with children under the age of five on whether they slept under a mosquito net is beneficial to help better understand malaria and the mosquito nets, which is a useful prevention technique.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ETSU/oai:dc.etsu.edu:asrf-1789 |
| Date | 07 April 2022 |
| Creators | Turner, Marissa |
| Publisher | Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University |
| Source Sets | East Tennessee State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Source | Appalachian Student Research Forum & Jay S. Boland Undergraduate Research Symposium |
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