Abstract
The widespread impacts of malaria in the tropical regions of the developing world are not only on healthcare issues but also an agricultural output. Malaria causes manpower loss when it strikes farmers at critical planting, weeding, and harvesting times. Given the above, the expected outcome to malaria prevention programs in farming communities remains a far cry, especially where the predisposing factors are not properly identified and long-lasting solutions proffered. Consequently, this study was designed to assess the malaria predisposing factors among the crop production farmers attending the Ndop District Hospital. The microscopy method was used to determine the presence of malaria parasitaemia. The following categorical variables were considered predisposing factors: Sex, history on malaria illness/treatment, use of long-lasting insecticide nets (LLINs) and knowledge on malaria transmission/prevention. A four-point Likert-type rating scale was adopted for the scoring of the responses given on the predisposing factors, while Fisher's exact test was used to assess the associations between malaria and each of the predisposing factors. The prevalence of malaria parasitaemia among the crop production farmers was 20% (143/715). The predisposing factors tested were found to be significantly associated to the occurrence of malaria among the crop production farmers. Therefore, the combination of improved existing and innovative malaria control strategies may possibly ensure sustained malaria decrease among the farmers in the Ndop Health District.
Highlights
The most recent world malaria report observed that there were 228 million cases of malaria in 2018 compared to 231 million cases in 2017, resulting to an estimated 405,000 and 416,000 malaria deaths in 2018 and 2017, respectively [1]
Malaria was detected in all age and sex groups
The older adult category was the least represented in this study, it had the highest prevalence of malaria
Summary
The most recent world malaria report observed that there were 228 million cases of malaria in 2018 compared to 231 million cases in 2017, resulting to an estimated 405,000 and 416,000 malaria deaths in 2018 and 2017, respectively [1]. Malaria remains prevalent in Cameroon with an estimated annual malaria suspected cases being roughly 3.3-3.7 million in health services [3]. In addition to the cost on health care, malaria cause loss of manpower hours and slows adoption of improved agricultural practices [4]. It has a significant impact on food security which affects peoples’ health. Agriculture has been seen as one of the causes of increased intensity of malaria around the world [4, 6,7,8], due to the fact that it favors the presence of mosquito breeding sites which could be malaria vectors [4, 9,10,11,12]
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