Prevalence of Cryptosporidium and Giardia infections in under-five children with diarrhoea in Blantyre, Malawi
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Diarrhoeal diseases are common among children in low- and middle-income countries and are major causes of morbidity and mortality. Cryptosporidium and Giardia are considered to be the main parasitic causes of diarrhoea in children. The aim of the present study was to determine the prevalence and associated factors of Cryptosporidium and Giardia infection in children under five years of age presenting at two health centres (Ndirande and Limbe) in Blantyre, Malawi. METHODS: This cross-sectional study was performed from February to July 2019 and included 972 children under 5 years of age with diarrhoea. Stool samples were immediately tested after collection at enrolment with a rapid diagnostic test for Cryptosporidium and Giardia infection. Descriptive statistics were used to assess the prevalence of these protozoan parasitic infections, and differences in the basic demographic and anthroponotic variables (between children with diarrhoea and parasite infection, being either Cryptosporidium and Giardia or both versus children with diarrhoea but no RDT confirmed parasite infection) were assessed. Their association with Cryptosporidium and Giardia infection was analysed using simple logistic regressions. RESULTS: Of the children recruited, 88 (9.1%) tested positive for Cryptosporidium and 184 (18.9%) for Giardia. Children with only a Giardia infection or a coinfection (of both parasites) were significantly older (mean age 24-26 months) compared to children with only a Cryptosporidium infection (mean age 13 months) or no parasitic infection (mean age 14 months). No significant differences were found with respect to gender, body temperature, stunting or wasting between the different groups of children with moderate to severe diarrhoea. Children attending the Ndirande health centre had almost two times higher odds of testing positive for both infections than those attending Limbe health centre. CONCLUSION: Cryptosporidium and Giardia infections are highly prevalent in children < 5 years with moderate to severe diarrhoea attending the Limbe and Ndirande health centres in Blantyre, Malawi.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".