Estimating the Variation in Malaria Incidence Rate in Heterogeneous Populations

• Activity Number: 140
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 1, 2011 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics in Epidemiology
• Author(s): Osho O. Ajayi*+
• Companies: American University of Nigeria
• Keywords: Possion mixture distribution ; Malaria model ; Incidence rate heterogeneity ; Malaria data and population diversity

Abstract

Malaria kills hundreds of thousands of people, including children, around the world every year. While these aggregation of malaria related death figure across age and other important demographic variables make it possible for people actively working to find a plausible solution to the problem to easily comprehend its seriousness, it however hides the fact that in a heterogeneous community, the incidence of reported cases of malaria is highly variable. A good knowledge of the level of this incidence variability among communities can be a useful tool for an effective control policy formulation. This work used a poisson mixture distribution to models the incidence of malaria in a community greatly localized but highly heterogeneous with respect to ethnic background and its influence on daily cultural practice dictating lifestyle. The parameters of the model showed significant variation between groups and may be used a tool for an effective malaria control program deployment in settings with very similar settlement characteristics.