A Socio-demographic Comparison of Malnutrition and Malaria Prevalence among Primary School Children in Gombe State Nigeria

Background: Despite the complex nature of inter-relationship between malnutrition and malaria, there has been continued emphasis and need to further re-examine the twin issues side-by-side with a view to forging an integrated public health care strategy.

Objective: This study aimed to make comparison and possibly add to the increasing body of evidence on the relationship between malnutrition and malaria among apparently healthy primary school children in Gombe state, Nigeria.

Methodology: Between the months of March and June 2019, a total of 745 school children aged 6 to 15 years were studied using a cross sectional design. Selection of the children was done by means of a multi-stage sampling technique, from 12 public and 6 private schools in 6 Local Government Areas (LGAs) of the state. Levels of malnutrition among the subjects were measured using three anthropometric indices, namely; stunting (Height-for-age Z-scores, HAZ), underweight (Weight-for-age Z-scores, WAZ) and wasting (Weight-for-height Z-score, WHZ); while screening for malaria infection was done using rapid diagnostic test (RDT) kits. The WHO AnthroPlus and IBM SPSS version 21 statistical software packages were used for data analysis. Descriptive statistics was employed to summarize research findings, while chi square statistics was used to compare proportions at 0.05 alpha significance level.

Results: About half (50.9%) of the subjects were boys while girls constitutes the rest 49.1%. The overall prevalence of stunting was 22.5% (19.6 - 25.6), underweight 20.9% (18.1 - 23.9), and wasting, 16.8% (13.7 - 20.4). Furthermore, malaria infection prevalence among the subjects was 13.6%. Age group and sex were found to be significantly associated with malnutrition (underweight or stunting or both) but they weren’t with malaria. On the other hand, while place of residence and level of education were significantly associated with malaria, they were not associated with malnutrition. Overall, both malnutrition and malaria were found to be significantly associated with type of school, senatorial district, tribe, religion, occupation of father, occupation of mother and level of education of mother. On the whole, malnutrition and malaria were significantly associated.

Conclusion: In light of the above epidemiological pattern of distribution and associations between the two public health problems, the design of intervention programmes should integrate approaches targeted at the two issues among primary school children.