Abstract
BackgroundDiarrhoea is the second commonest cause of under-five mortality accounting for over half a million deaths annually. Although the prevalence of diarrhoea in Plateau State is lower than the national figure, the level remains high despite remarkable progress in the reduction of under-five mortality. This study seeks to determine the pattern of diarrhoea disease among under-fives in Plateau State.MethodsWe extracted data from the Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response platform between January 2013 and December 2017 and analysed the trends of diarrhoea, age-specific case fatality rate (ASCFR), and seasonal patterns. We modelled the quarterly pattern of diarrhoea cases using additive time series and predicted the expected cases for 2018–2020.ResultsWe documented 60,935 cases of diarrhoea with age group 12–59 months having the highest number of cases (49.3%). The age group < 1 month had the highest ASCFR of 0.53%. Seasonal variation showed cases peaked in the first and third quarters of each year, except for the year 2016. The time series projection estimated 16,256, 17,645 and 19,034 cases in the year 2018, 2019 and 2020 respectively.ConclusionSeasonal variation exists, and trends show an increased pattern of diarrhoeal disease among under-fives. There is a need to strengthen the implementation of diarrhoeal preventive and control strategy in the state and to improve the quality of data reporting.
Highlights
Diarrhoea is the second commonest cause of under-five mortality accounting for over half a million deaths annually
The Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response (IDSR) 003 tool collects monthly data on forty (40) priority health events including diarrhoea. They collect this data from health facilities and sent to Local Government Area (LGA) Disease Surveillance and Notification Officer (DSNO) who collates the data and transmits to the State DSNO who transmits this to the Federal Ministry of Health (FMOH) monthly
Frequency distribution of observed and 3 months moving average of cases of diarrhoea in Plateau State across the year showed an upward trend with a trend line slope of 0.02162 (Fig. 1)
Summary
Diarrhoea is the second commonest cause of under-five mortality accounting for over half a million deaths annually. Diarrhoea is the second commonest cause of childhood mortality among children under 5 years of age [1]. Children under 3 years of age experience on average three episodes of diarrhoea every year. Diarrhoea disease is the leading cause of infant and child mortality in developing countries, and about 1.8 million children die per annum from this disease. These numbers of diarrhoeal deaths are still high despite a fall in childhood diarrhoeal disease from 4.6 million to 0.8 million over the last three decades [3,4,5]. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 525,000 under-five children die globally because of diarrhoeal diseases each year, with 1.7 billion cases of diarrhoeal disease diagnosed annually [1]
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