Soil-transmitted helminth infections and nutritional status in Ecuador: findings from a national survey and implications for control strategies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The estimation of prevalence and intensity of soil-transmitted helminth (STH) infections at a country-level is an essential prerequisite for the implementation of a rational control programme. The aim of this present study was to estimate the prevalence and distribution of STH infections and malnutrition in school-age children in rural areas of Ecuador.Cross-sectional study from October 2011 to May 2012.Eighteen rural schools were randomly selected from the three ecological regions of Ecuador (coastal, highlands and Amazon basin).920 children aged 6-16 years.Prevalence and intensity of STH infections associated with malnutrition (thinness/wasting or stunting).The results showed that 257 (27.9%) children were infected with at least one STH parasite. The prevalence of Trichuris trichiura, Ascaris lumbricoides and hookworm was 19.3%, 18.5% and 5.0%, respectively. Malnutrition was present in 14.2% of children and most common was stunting (12.3%). Compared with other regions, schoolchildren in the Amazon region had the highest STH prevalence (58.9%) of which a greater proportion of infections were moderate/heavy intensity (45.6%) and had the highest prevalence of malnutrition (20.4%). A positive association was observed between moderate to heavy infections with A. lumbricoides and malnutrition (adjusted OR 1.85, 95% CI 1.04 to 3.31, p=0.037).Our estimate of the prevalence of STH infections of 27.9% at a national level in Ecuador is lower than suggested by previous studies. Our data indicate that schoolchildren living in the Amazon region have a greater risk of STH infection and stunting compared with children from other regions. The implementation of school-based preventive chemotherapy and nutritional supplement programmes within the Amazon region should be prioritised. Long-term control strategies require improvements in water, sanitation and hygiene.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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) | 0.001 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".