Schistosomiasis in Uganda: What factors affect mainly the spread of the infection?

Abstract

Schistosomiasis represents a heavy burden for developing countries. In particular, the infection is quite widespread in Uganda where it reaches high prevalence in many regions. In this paper, we investigate the factors that mainly influence the probability of contracting the infection on the basis of a dataset formed by 24,918 observations. Data was collected between April and June 2017 through a survey on households in some districts of Uganda. Due to the hierarchical structure of the data, the analysis has been carried out with multilevel regression models. Results show that hygienic conditions and absence of water resources are strongly correlated with the spread of the infection.