Prevalence of Malaria among Febrile Patients Attending Government Hospitals in Ondo State, South-West Nigeria

Abstract

The use of malaria infection prevalence among febrile patients is a valuable epidemiological surveillance tool. In this study, a cross sectional study was conducted among febrile patients in selected government Hospitals in Ondo State for malaria prevalence. Plasmodium falciparum is the only encountered malaria parasite with prevalence values of 82.72% (426/515) and 80.19% (413/515) obtained using microscopy and RDTs respectively. The prevalence of malaria among the males (86.59%) was higher than the females (80.65%), all age groups in this study were vulnerable with highest infection rate of 89.66% among age group 11-20 years. The parasites densities ranged between 209 and 22310 parasites/μL with a mean parasitaemia of 5522.17±183.30 parasites/μL. The prevalence of malaria among the febrile participants that have used antimalarial drug before visiting the hospital is 82.94% (389/469) with the mean parasitaemia of 4615.21±188.14 parasites/μL while those that have used herbs before visiting the hospital had malaria prevalence of 85.03% (142/167) with the mean parasitaemia of 4913.81±330.20 parasites/μL. There was high prevalence of malaria among febrile patients. This finding will help improve the diagnosis and treatment of other febrile (non-malaria) infections, limit antimalarial usage to only malaria parasite-based test true positives and serve as a guide to combat malaria drug resistance in the study area.