Abstract
Malaria is considered endemic in over hundred countries across the globe. Many cases of malaria and deaths due to malaria occur in Sub-Saharan Africa. The disease is of great public health concern since it affects people of all age groups more especially pregnant women and children because of their vulnerability. This study sought to use vector autoregression (VAR) models to model the impact of climatic variability on malaria. Monthly climatic data (rainfall, maximum temperature, and relative humidity) from 2010 to 2015 were obtained from the Ghana Meteorological Agency while data on malaria for the same period were obtained from the Ghana Health Service. Results of the Granger and instantaneous causality tests led to a conclusion that malaria is influenced by all three climatic variables. The impulse response analyses indicated that the highest positive effect of maximum temperature, relative humidity, and rainfall on malaria is observed in the months of September, March, and October, respectively. The decomposition of forecast variance indicates varying degree of malaria dependence on the climatic variables, with as high as 12.65% of the variability in the trend of malaria which has been explained by past innovations in maximum temperature alone. This is quite significant and therefore, policy-makers should not ignore temperature when formulating policies to address malaria.
Highlights
Malaria is considered endemic in over hundred countries across the globe and many cases of malaria and deaths due to malaria occur in Sub-Saharan Africa
The time series plots of the original data are presented in Figure 2 which indicates an obvious seasonality in both malaria and the climatic variables considered
The results reveal that on the average, while about 73.67% of the variability in the trend of malaria has been explained by past innovations in malaria cases, a significant proportion of the variability in the trend of malaria has been explained by past innovations in maximum temperature
Summary
The disease is of great public health concern since it affects people of all age groups more especially pregnant women and children because of their vulnerability [1, 2]. Malaria is caused by blood parasites transmitted from person to person through the bites of infected mosquitoes [3, 4]. In the absence of prompt and effective treatment, malaria remains a life-threatening disease and about 3.2 billion people, which are almost half of the world’s population, are at risk of it [4]. Malaria has been described as an entrenched global health challenge. Malaria can be said to affect people of all regions, both poor and rich [5]
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