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Malaria remains the leading cause of hospital admission and in-hospital death in children under 2 in Sierra Leone

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Malaria remains the leading cause of hospital admission and in-hospital death in children under 2 in Sierra Leone

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Malaria, respiratory infections and diarrhea are the leading causes of hospitalization and death during the first two years of life in Sierra Leone, according to a prospective study led by ISGlobal, a center supported by the "la Caixa" Foundation. The findings, obtained as part of the ICARIA project and published in The Lancet Global Health, show that, despite the implementation of the main preventive strategies currently available, Sierra Leone continues to have one of the highest child mortality rates in the world.

Globally, child mortality has declined substantially over recent decades, but the progress achieved up to 2015 has stalled. In many countries across sub-Saharan Africa, infectious diseases remain one of the greatest threats to survival during the first years of life.

Although Sierra Leone has introduced major public health initiatives—including free health care for children under 5, malaria chemoprevention, pneumococcal vaccination and, more recently, the malaria vaccine—it remains difficult to assess their impact on survival during the first two years of life. Routine surveillance systems generally group all children under 5 into a single category, making it difficult to accurately identify the main causes of hospitalization and death in this age group.

"To address this important knowledge gap, we followed 20,560 infants up to 24 months of age across 14 health centers in three districts of Sierra Leone," explains Kwabena Owusu-Kyei, an ISGlobal researcher based in Sierra Leone and first author of the study.


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