Date of Award

January 2014

Document Type

Open Access Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Public Health (MPH)

Department

School of Public Health

First Advisor

Sunil Parikh

Abstract

Malaria is mesoendemic in Uganda; with an entomological inoculation rate (EIR) estimated at 562 infective bites per person year (PPY), Tororo, a rural district located in Eastern Uganda, is one of the highest transmission sites. This study leveraged participants enrolled in two NIH funded trails at the Tororo District Hospital in Tororo, Uganda in order to determine whether there is a difference in parasitemia levels and the strain dynamics of Plasmodium falciparum between simultaneously collected venous and capillary blood samples over the course of 42 days of follow-up. Parasitemia levels were examined on-site via microscopy of thick and thin blood smears. Capillary and venous blood samples were blotted onto filter paper and genotyping was conducted at Yale University in order to determine whether there are differences in the strain dynamics P. falciparum in capillary or venous blood. In this prospective cohort study of 196 participants, a total of 587 simultaneously collected pairs of capillary and venous were examined. Parasite measurements of the capillary and venous pairs were analyzed via repeated measures of ANOVA and the means were proven to be different with a p-value of <0.001. These results add to the dearth of literature in this topic and may have implications for the protocol of clinical trials of malaria and malaria diagnosis, drug resistance testing, and drug efficacy testing in research settings.

Comments

This is an Open Access Thesis.

Open Access

This Article is Open Access

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