Forecasting the Effects of Roll Back Malaria Intervention in Mubi North Local Government Area, Nigeria: An PAR (p) Model Approach

摘要

Malaria is a long lasting parasitic disease which transmit through the bites of an infected female Anopheles mosquito. The World Health Organization report shows that malaria is transmitted throughout Nigeria with 97% of the population at risk. It is a leading cause of mortality in children under five years of age and responsible for an estimated 225,000 deaths annually. To effectively tack the increasing global problem of malaria, Roll Back malaria was launched in 1998 as a new intervention to bring malaria cases to the barest minimum by year 2015 in Africa. However, the program still fall short of achieving universal access to preventive measure, diagnosis testing and treatment (WHO, 2012). Nigeria is one of the countries that are unable to provide evidence of impact due to incompleteness or inconsistency of reporting over time. In this study a modified version of Poisson Exponentially weighted Moving Average (PEWMA), the Poisson Autoregressive (PAR(p)) model, is used to model the trend and forecast of malaria cases in Mubi North Local Government Area of Adamawa State, Nigeria. The data on reported cases of malaria from the year 2008 to 2015 were obtained from National Health Management Information System through Primary Health Care Agency in Mubi. The analysis shows that a minimum of 1457 monthly cases of malaria were reported before and after the intervention. Stationarity of the data was obtained using natural logarithm transformation at the first difference and the adequate model for the Poisson Autoregressive model of order p is ARIMA (3, 1, 0). Result indicates a significant decline in monthly cases of malaria with AR 1, 2 and 3 estimates values as -0.864, -0.556 and -0.238 and a significant p-values as 0.00, 0.00 and 0.004 respectively. The forecasting results for the months of January, February and March 2016 malaria counts are 657, 348 and 256 respectively, this result shows that malaria cases is declining significantly and thus we recommend that the Government should sustain the intervention.