ABSTRACT Malaria is a major public health challenge in Kenya especially among young children and pregnant women. It accounts for 30% of all outpatient attendances, 19% of all admissions and leads to 20% of all deaths in children aged below five years. Despite much effort to fight malaria, the efforts have been undermined by malaria parasites that develop resistance to the commonly available malaria drugs. Since a new antimalarial drug, Artemether - Lumefantrine (AL) was introduced in Kenya i...
ABSTRACT HIV/AIDS is a debilitating disease associated with high mortality and morbidity globally. In Kenya, it is the major cause of mortality across all gender and age groups, in effect, putting a huge demand on the healthcare system and the economy. The HIV 1 positive population faces major challenges such as the drug resistance, severe hepatic coupled with immunological deficiencies and toxicity. The problems are aggravated by co-infection with blood borne diseases, varied responses to ...
ABSTRACT Sanitation has been a thorny issue especially in many informal settlements all over the world with the third world countries being highly affected. Therefore people living in these affected areas are exposed to these deplorable conditions. Kenya is not spared either and therefore our informal settlements are suffering from myriad of sanitation related problems that are causing slum residents to be unprotected from all manner of exposures. Since there are a lot of underlying factors ...
ABSTRACT In 2006, Kenya developed and adopted Community Health Strategy as a means of enhancing community access to Healthcare services. Although there has been scientific evidence that community based health approaches are effective in delivering specific health services, there has been little effort to examine the performance of the Kenya’s Community Health Strategy against sanitation indicators. This analytical cross-sectional study was therefore designed to evaluate the effects of Comm...
Introduction The 2020 World Bank data estimates Nigeria's population to be about 202 million. Nigeria is also a multi-ethnic federation with 36 states spread across 6 geopolitical regions (North-Central, North-West, North-East, South-South, South-East, and South-West) and the Federal Capital Territory. The country's major source of revenue is oil and gas, with a Gross domestic product (GDP) of 23.4 billion USD. Health expenditure accounts for 3.7% of the total GDP and the total per capital e...
ABSTRACT Sanitation is a basic necessity that contributes to better human health, dignity and quality of life. The economic and social benefits of sanitation interventions create more time for productive pursuits, higher productivity, better performance at school and work, lower medical costs.Despite Nyeri County ranked by the Ministry of Health as number one county in terms of sanitation coverage, it has 25.4% unimproved sanitation and 0.3 % open defecation. This study was designed to ident...
ABSTRACT The desire to correct the poor implementation of traditional antenatal care (ANC) in developing countries resulted to the adoption of antenatal care model termed as Focused Antenatal Care (FANC). The goal of FANC is to ensure a good outcome for both the baby and mother and prevent complication during pregnancy, labor, delivery and postpartum period. It is characterized by four main focused visits. Studies have shown that Kenya has long suffered from high maternal morbidity and morta...
ABSTRACT Cause of diarrhea is known to have many risk factors. They include unsafe water, lack of water leading to low personal and domestic hygiene, poor water infrastructural and management systems. Contamination of drinking water is known to be a problem in many developing countries. This is even of more concern in high residential low income areas. Nairobi City is not an exception hence this study was conducted in Kasarani to assess diarrhea disease attributed to water, sanitation and hy...
ABSTRACT Vitamin A intake is one of the dietary interventions that support the achievement of nutrition priority outcomes. Inadequate Vitamin A intake leads to its deficiency which causes depressed immune response, impaired movement of iron, poor growth, night blindness and xerophthalmia major public health concerns. Vitamin A deficiency has been addressed through supplementation worldwide to children under the age of 59 months. The purpose of this study was to assess Vitamin A intake and su...
ABSTRACT Globally, diarrhea remains the second leading cause of reported mortalities among children (0-59 months) and a cause of significant morbidity, especially in developing countries. In Kenya, diarrhea accounts for 16% of deaths among children (0-59 months). It’s a major cause of mortality in children below five years after malaria and pneumonia in Busia County. Many of the children die due to poor home-based management of diarrhea. The main aim of the study was to explore the differe...
ABSTRACT Pre-school children represent the population most vulnerable to malaria and malnutrition in Sub-Saharan Africa. The available data is conflicting as to whether malnutrition is associated with an increased or decreased risk of malaria. This study sought to determine the impact of child malnutrition on anti-P. falciparum IgG response in a comparative cross-sectional approach. Anthropometric measurements of height and weight plus standard deviation in Z-scores were determined in 380 ch...
ABSTRACT About 33.4 million people were living with HIV as of 2008 globally; 2.1 million of them were children under 15 years, and about 15.7 million were women. In certain parts of the world, HIV infection has significantly affected child survival. The World Health Report 2005 estimated that HIV infection contributed 3% to the global mortality among children younger than 5 years of age in 2005. According to UNAIDS and WHO 2004, there were more than 1.3 million people infected with HIV and A...
ABSTRACT Complementary feeding is the greatest contributor to health and nutrition status of infants and young children. Malnutrition remains one of the greatest concerns in SubSaharan Africa region. In Kenya, national findings show inappropriate complementary feeding practices. Out-patient therapeutic programmes (OTPs) have been established to address severe acute malnutrition (SAM) among children 6-59 months of age. There are 6 OTP centres in Kamukunji sub-county in, Nairobi County. There ...
ABSTRACT Pneumococcal disease remains the biggest killer of children living in Kenya. This is true despite inclusion of the 10-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine in the Kenya Expanded Program on Immunization. Serotype replacement, emergence of antibiotic resistance, inaccurate laboratory diagnosis due to optochin resistant bacterial types and a range of environmental and host related risk factors have been touted to be the cause of these statistics elsewhere. This study sought to establis...
ABSTRACT. This study was carried out to determine the incidences of Fusarium species, fumonisin B1 and aflatoxin B1 production in sorghum and finger millet grains collected from selected districts of Western Kenya region. The grains were collected randomly from five locations per district in Nyamira, Kakamega, Busia and Teso districts respectively. Ten farmers per location were randomly selected and samples of 0.25 kg of grains were picked per variety. A total of 16 sorghum varieties and 14...