An investigation of district spatial variations of childhood diarrhoea and fever morbidity in Malawi
Abstract
Although diarrhoea and malaria are among the leading causes of child mortality and morbidity in Sub-Saharan Africa, few detailed studies have examined the patterns and determinants of these ailments in the most affected communities. In this paper, we investigate the spatial distribution of observed diarrhoea and fever prevalence in Malawi using individual data for 10,185 children from the 2000 Malawi Demographic and Health survey. We highlight inequalities in child health by mapping the residual district spatial effects using a geo-additive probit model that simultaneously controls for spatial dependence in the data and potential nonlinear effects of covariates. The residual spatial effects were modelled via a Bayesian approach. For both ailments, we were able to identify a distinct district pattern of childhood morbidity. In particular, the results suggest that children living in the capital city are less affected by fever, although this is not true for diarrhoea, where some urban agglomerations are associated with a higher childhood morbidity risk. The spatial patterns emphasize the role of remoteness as well as climatic, environmental, and geographic factors on morbidity. The fixed effects show that for diarrhoea, the risk of child morbidity appears to be lower among infants who are exclusively breastfed than among those who are mixed-fed. However, exclusive breastfeeding was not found to have a protective effect on fever. An important socio-economic factor for both diarrhoea and fever morbidity was parental education, especially maternal educational attainment. Diarrhoea and fever were both observed to show an interesting association with child's age. We were able to discern the continuous worsening of the child morbidity up to 8-12 months of age. This deterioration set in right after birth and continues, more or less linearly until 8-12 months, before beginning to decline thereafter. Independent of other factors, a separate spatial process produces district inequalities in child's health.Download Info
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
Bibliographic Info
Article provided by Elsevier in its journal Social Science & Medicine.
Volume (Year): 62 (2006)
Issue (Month): 5 (March)
Pages: 1138-1152
Contact details of provider:
Web page: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/315/description#description
Order Information:
Postal: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/regional
Web: http://www.elsevier.com/orderme/journalorderform.cws_home/315/journalorderform1/orderooc/id=654&ref=654_01_ooc_1&version=01
Related research
Keywords: Residual spatial effects District inequalities Clustering Diarrhoea Fever Fixed effects Bayesian approach Malawi;References
No references listed on IDEASYou can help add them by filling out this form.
Citations
Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.Cited by:
- Lawrence Kazembe, 2009. "Modelling individual fertility levels in Malawian women: a spatial semiparametric regression model," Statistical Methods and Applications, Springer, vol. 18(2), pages 237-255, July.
- Yusuf, Shahid & Nabeshima, Kaoru & Wei Ha, 2007. "What makes cities healthy ?," Policy Research Working Paper Series 4107, The World Bank.
Lists
This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.Statistics
Access and download statisticsCorrections
When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:62:y:2006:i:5:p:1138-1152For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Wendy Shamier).
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.
If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.