Abstract
Background: Malaria continues to be a major public health problem in Malawi and the greatest load of mortality and morbidity occurs in children five years and under. However, there is no information yet regarding trends and predictions of malaria incidence in children five years and under at district hospital level, particularly at Nsanje district hospital. Aim: Therefore, this study aimed at investigating the trends of malaria morbidity and mortality in order to design appropriate interventions on the best approach to contain the disease in the near future. Methodology: Trend analysis of malaria morbidity and mortality together with time series analysis using the SARIMA (Seasonal Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average) model was used to predict malaria incidence in Nsanje district. Results: The SARIMA model used malaria cases from 2015 to 2019 and created the best model to forecast the malaria cases in Nsanje from 2020 to 2022. An SARIMA (0, 1, 2) (0,1,1)12 was suitable for forecasting the incidence of malaria for Nsanje. Conclusion: The mortality and morbidity trend showed that malaria cases were growing at a fluctuating rate at Nsanje district hospital. The relative errors between the actual values and predicted values indicated that the predicted values matched the actual values well. Therefore, the model proved that it was adequate to forecast monthly malaria cases and it had a good fit, hence, was appropriate for this study
Highlights
There are 106 countries in the world at risk of the transmission of malaria infection where 216 million estimated malaria cases occurred in 2010, 81% of which were reported in the African Region, followed by South East Asia (13%) and the Eastern MediterraneanRegion (5%) [1]
Malaria is a severe disease that is caused by parasites of the genus plasmodium, which is transmitted to humans by a bite of an infected female mosquito of the species anopheles
3% increase from 2020 to 2021 and a 2% decrease from 2021 to 2022. These results show a cyclical pattern of malaria case incidence and the results are similar to those of [4]
Summary
There are 106 countries in the world at risk of the transmission of malaria infection where 216 million estimated malaria cases occurred in 2010, 81% of which were reported in the African Region, followed by South East Asia (13%) and the Eastern MediterraneanRegion (5%) [1]. There are 106 countries in the world at risk of the transmission of malaria infection where 216 million estimated malaria cases occurred in 2010, 81% of which were reported in the African Region, followed by South East Asia (13%) and the Eastern Mediterranean. 2010, 91% of whom occurred in the African Region, 6% in South East Asia and 3% in the Eastern Mediterranean Region [2]. Malaria is a severe disease that is caused by parasites of the genus plasmodium, which is transmitted to humans by a bite of an infected female mosquito of the species anopheles. Plasmodium are global pathogens with a complex life cycle alternating between female Anopheles mosquitoes and vertebrate hosts that require the formation of unique zoite forms to invade different cell types at specific stages [3].
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