The Cancer Diseases Hospital (CDH) 2019 annual report revealed an upsurge in the number of new cancer patients accessing services from 35 patients in 2006 to 3,008 in 2019. This study explored the experiences and coping strategies of women caring for their husbands with cancer attending the CDH. A phenomenological research design was used with stratified purposeful sampling.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Urinary schistosomiasis has been a major public health problem in Zambia for many years. However, the disease profile may vary in different locale due to the changing ecosystem that contributes to the risk of acquiring the disease. The objective of this study was to quantify risk factors associated with the intensity of urinary schistosomiasis infection in school children in Lusaka Province, Zambia, in order to better understand local transmission.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Provision of free anti-retroviral therapy in Zambia started in June 2004. There were only 15,000 people on treatment as at December that year, mainly due to lack of access. This number rose to 580,000 people as at December 2013.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: It is common in public health and epidemiology that the outcome of interest is counts of events occurrence. Analysing these data using classical linear models is mostly inappropriate, even after transformation of outcome variables due to overdispersion. Zero-adjusted mixture count models such as zero-inflated and hurdle count models are applied to count data when over-dispersion and excess zeros exist.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Schistosomiasis in one of the most prevalent parasitic diseases, affecting millions of people and animals in developing countries. Amongst the human-infective species S. haematobium is one of the most widespread causing urogenital schistosomiasis, a major human health problem across Africa, however in terms of research this human pathogen has been severely neglected.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSchistosoma mansoni is a widespread human helminth and causes intestinal schistosomiasis in 54 countries, mainly across Africa but also in Madagascar, the Arabian Peninsula and the neotropics. The geographical range of this parasite relies on the distribution of certain species of freshwater pulmonate snails of the genus Biomphalaria. Whilst S.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: After many years of general neglect, interest has grown and efforts came under way for the mapping, control, surveillance, and eventual elimination of neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). Disease risk estimates are a key feature to target control interventions, and serve as a benchmark for monitoring and evaluation. What is currently missing is a georeferenced global database for NTDs providing open-access to the available survey data that is constantly updated and can be utilized by researchers and disease control managers to support other relevant stakeholders.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe geographical ranges of most species, including many infectious disease agents and their vectors and intermediate hosts, are assumed to be constrained by climatic tolerances, mainly temperature. It has been suggested that global warming will cause an expansion of the areas potentially suitable for infectious disease transmission. However, the transmission of infectious diseases is governed by a myriad of ecological, economic, evolutionary and social factors.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSchistosomiasis remains one of the most prevalent parasitic diseases in the tropics and subtropics, but current statistics are outdated due to demographic and ecological transformations and ongoing control efforts. Reliable risk estimates are important to plan and evaluate interventions in a spatially explicit and cost-effective manner. We analysed a large ensemble of georeferenced survey data derived from an open-access neglected tropical diseases database to create smooth empirical prevalence maps for Schistosoma mansoni and Schistosoma haematobium for a total of 13 countries of eastern Africa.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe rapidly growing field of three-dimensional software modeling of the Earth holds promise for applications in the geospatial health sciences. Easy-to-use, intuitive virtual globe technologies such as Google Earth enable scientists around the world to share their data and research results in a visually attractive and readily understandable fashion without the need for highly sophisticated geographical information systems (GIS) or much technical assistance. This paper discusses the utility of the rapid and simultaneous visualization of how the agents of parasitic diseases are distributed, as well as that of their vectors and/or intermediate hosts together with other spatially-explicit information.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn line with the aims of the "National Bilharzia Control Programme" and the "School Health and Nutrition Programme" in Zambia, a study on urinary schistosomiasis was conducted in 20 primary schools of Lusaka province to further our understanding of the epidemiology of the infection, and to enhance spatial targeting of control. We investigated risk factors associated with urinary schistosomiasis, and examined small-scale spatial heterogeneity in prevalence, using data collected from 1,912 schoolchildren, 6 to 15-year-old, recruited from 20 schools in Kafue and Luangwa districts. The risk factors identified included geographical location, altitude, normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), maximum temperature, age, sex of the child and intermediate host snail abundance.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAvailability of geo-referenced data has increased applications of spatially explicit models to understand important health problems in developing countries. This study aims to investigate joint and disease-specific spatial clusters of fever and diarrhoea at a highly disaggregate level, while simultaneously estimating the influence of other covariates. Using the 2000 Malawi DHS, a logistic model was fitted with spatial random effects partitioned into shared and specific effects.
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