Malaria patients in Nigeria: Data exploration approach

Abstract

Malaria is a life threatening disease which is usually transmitted to people through the bite of infected female anopheles mosquitoes. However, this article deals with the data exploration of malaria symptoms reported by 337 patients attended to at Federal Polytechnic Ilaro Medical centre, Ogun State Nigeria. The study covers a period of four (4) weeks monitoring of patients attendance, their consultation with physician and malaria test results as compared to their claims of malaria infection. Logistic regression was used for the basic analysis of the dataset and it was discovered that people in the age range 38-47 years are mostly affected with malaria and that females are the most infected gender species with headache being the most significant symptom based on its Wald statistic value. This study strongly recommends the introduction of a long lasting malaria prevention scheme that cut across all categories of ages and genders within the Nigerian community, and that self-medication should be seriously warned against as most claims of malaria were not actually found to be true upon verification.

Keywords: Headache; Logistic regression; Malaria; Mosquitoes.

Fig. 1

Age distribution (Years).

Fig. 2

Percentage distribution of Ages (Years).

Fig. 3

Bar Chart showing the distribution of gender.

Fig. 4

Multiple Bar Chart showing the distribution of gender and Malaria.

Fig. 5

Diagram of predictive probabilities.

Fig. S1