Assessing the impact of mean monthly rainfall on malaria prevalence in Gulu Municipality

Abstract

Rainfall is the most important weather parameter in sub-Saharan Africa as the economies of the countries within this region especially in East Africa mainly depend on rain-fed agriculture. The main objective of the study was to assess the impact of mean monthly rainfall on malaria prevalence in Gulu municipality for the period of five years (2015-2019). The datasets used in this study included monthly rainfall data and malaria prevalence data obtained from Gulu meteorological station and Gulu referral hospital respectively having the same span. Generally, normalized mean monthly rainfall results, depicted positive linear trends in all the years implying an increase in mean monthly rainfall though not statistically significant (P>0.05). Similarly, normalized malaria cases over Gulu municipality depicted positive linear trends in all the years except 2017 and significant trends were only observed in 2015 and 2018. Correlation analysis revealed that there was a significant relation between rainfall and malaria prevalence with significant relationship observed in 2019 since this was the year when most parts of Uganda received high amount of rainfall. Therefore, based on the monthly differences in malaria prevalence cases the peak season was recorded during the peak period of high rainfall, explaining the variability of water amount to the breeding and spread of mosquitoes.