CHAPTER ONE
1.0 INTRODUCTION
Malaria is a significant public health problem in more than 100 countries of the world and causes an estimated 200 million new infections every year. Despite the significant effort to educate this dangerous disease, lack of complete knowledge of its pathophysiology hampers the success in this enterprise. It is wide spread in tropical and sub tropical regions, including part of America, Asia and Africa. Each year, there are approximately 350-500 million cases of malaria (WHO, 2008) Killing between one and three million people, the majority of whom are young children in sub- Sahara Africa . (Snow et al., 2005). 90% of malaria-related deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa (Green Wood et al., 2005). Annually, some 300 million people get ill from malaria, about one million victims die every year, many of them children, in Africa, one child die of malaria about every 30 seconds according to the world health organization (WHO) “science still has no magic bullet for malaria and many doubt that such a solution will never exist”, malaria as well as being one of the most prevalent and dangerous disease known to man, is also by far the world’s most important tropical disease (Trigg and Kondrachi, 1993). The prevalence of malaria has been escalating at an alarming rate in the last decade. As a matter of fact, the prevalence of malaria in Owerri areas of Imo State (Ukpai and Akoju, 2001) reveals that Owerri has a high rate of malaria infections of 75% and the infection with plasmodiuTn falciparum ranks the highest. Hence, malaria is a major cause of morbidity and mortality.
1.1 JUSTIFICATION
As in many other malaria-endemic regions of sub-Saharan Africa, the most vulnerable groups are children within the age range of 0-5 years. Evidence has shown that the degree of malaria parasiteamia in children has serious effect on hepatic and renal parameters which contributes to the morbidity and mortality of malaria among children in this region. This therefore necessitated the need to study the effect of malaria on some hepatic and renal biochemical parameters.
1.2 AIMS AND OBJECTIVES
- AIM
To estimate the levels of renal and hepatic parameters in children with acute malaria parasitaemia in Federal Medical Centre, Owerri.
- SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES
- To determine the levels of some renal parameters[Electrolyte( , , and ), urea and creatinine] in children with acute malaria parasitaemia.
- To determine the levels of some hepatic parameters(AST,ALP,ALT and Proteins) in children with acute malaria parasitaemia.
- To compare the renal and hepatic parameters in children with acute malaria parasitaemia with that of the control subjects.
DISCLAIMER: All project works, files and documents posted on this website, eProjectTopics.com are the property/copyright of their respective owners. They are for research reference/guidance purposes only and some of the works may be crowd-sourced. Please don’t submit someone’s work as your own to avoid plagiarism and its consequences. Use it as a reference/citation/guidance purpose only and not copy the work word for word (verbatim). The paper should be used as a guide or framework for your own paper. The contents of this paper should be able to help you in generating new ideas and thoughts for your own study. eProjectTopics.com is a repository of research works where works are uploaded for research guidance. Our aim of providing this work is to help you eradicate the stress of going from one school library to another in search of research materials. This is a legal service because all tertiary institutions permit their students to read previous works, projects, books, articles, journals or papers while developing their own works. This is where the need for literature review comes in. “What a good artist understands is that nothing comes from nowhere. The paid subscription on eProjectTopics.com is a means by which the website is maintained to support Open Education. If you see your work posted here by any means, and you want it to be removed/credited, please contact us with the web address link to the work. We will reply to and honour every request. Please notice it may take up to 24 – 48 hours to process your request.
