Environmental threats and childhood fever during the rainy season in Dakar-Senegal: the use of a community survey in multilevel modeling

Stéphanie Dos Santos, Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD)
Iulia Rautu, Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD)
Jean-Yves Le Hesran, Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD)
Mody Diop, Agence Nationale de la Statistique et de la Démographie (ANSD)
Abdou Illou Mourtala, Ecole Nationale de Statistique
Alphousseyni Ndonky, Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar
Richard Lalou, Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD)

In African cities, a major cause of childhood fevers are water-related diseases, such as typhoid, or water-related vector, in particular mosquito-borne pathogens such as malaria and dengue. Apart from the individual and household characteristics, environmental factors can have an influence on those fevers especially during the rainy season. A household survey conducted in 2008 in Dakar was completed by a community questionnaire on environmental threats that could be factored into multilevel analyses. Using a data set of 7,300 children from 3,000 households dispatched within 50 neighborhoods, a three-level modeling process is presented. Rates of recent fever varied substantially from one neighborhood to another, ranging between 10 and 37%. Findings indicate that the occurrence of fever is influenced by factors from all three hierarchical levels, with environmental factors playing a relatively lower role than the other two. Among the environmental threats, the effect of the salubrity is particularly interesting.