Impact Of Climate Change On The Spread Of Malaria Among Children Under Five Years In Vihiga County, Kenya

ABSTRACT

Vihiga County for a long time has been known to be an endemic malaria region.

The presence of many rivers and high temperatures, is ideal for mosquitoes

breeding and maturity. However, the impact of changing climate and increasing

malaria prevalence in the region have received little attention. Temperatures have

increased over the past decades and rainfall decreased. Mosquitoes are

temperature sensitive whereby high temperatures exacerbate their breeding.

Therefore, this study aimed at investigating the changes in climate trends to

increased malaria prevalence in the region especially among children under five

years. The specific objectives were; to determine the changes in the rainfall and

temperature trends for the past forty years in Vihiga County; to examine the

impact of rainfall and temperature changes on the spread of malaria among the

children under five years in Vihiga County; to develop a malaria spread map of

Vihiga County. Instruments of data collection that were employed included the

questionnaires, interviews, content analysis, focus group discussion (FGD) and

downloaded digitized maps of the region. Purposive sampling was adopted. This

was to target children under five years and health centres. A sample size of 300

households was sampled. The study used both qualitative and quantitative

methods to analyse the data. Qualitative analysis tools, predictive analytic

software (PAS) was used to analyse the responses from the questionnaires,

interviews and FGD while Microsoft Excel was used to analyse the quantitative

data from the surveys on malaria prevalence, district hospital information system

(DHIS) data from hospital and climatic data from the metrological station.

Digitized Earth Map was downloaded from the internet for generating a slope

map while others drawn maps were collected from the statistical department of

Vihiga. The results revealed that temperatures have increased by 2°C for the past

forty years with annual increase of 0.04°C while rainfall has decreased by 50 mm

for the same period of time. The rainfall patterns have also changed with

increased rainfall during shorter season with short rains during the longer season.

Report reviled higher malaria prevalence during three months preceding rainy

season (May, June, and July). It was noted that the reported cases of malaria

prevalence are still high among children under five years. Population in the lower

grounds was most affected as depicted on the sentinel map. From the results, it

was concluded that temperature and rainfall have changed in the region. These

changes have aided in the increase of malaria prevalence in the region. The study

generated slope and sentinel maps to site the key sentinel health canters for early

malaria predictions. This is important to the community as it will assist in

monitoring the future malaria outbreak and easy accessibility to the affected area.

From the study, it was recommended that the county government should work

with international bodies like World Bank to enforce policies on land use and

safe energy to mitigate the impacts of climate change. The county government to

work with the national government in the war against malaria by implementing

the policies of making Kenya a malaria-free country. However, further studies

need to be conducted on how malaria immunization will be effective in war

against malaria among children under five years and how climate change will

affect mosquitos’ survival as they are likely to mutate to the drugs after

vaccination on children under five years.