Four years trends of malaria admissions in rural and urban Kandi health facilities in northeast of Benin Republic

Malaria clinical data from health facility records are used for evaluating control programmes’ impact and providing insights of epidemiological situation. In the present study we assessed trend of malaria admissions between 2009 and 2012 in rural and urban health facilities of the district of Kandi, a very arid area with particularly severe drought lasting up to 6 months. Curative care records in the Gansosso urban health facility and Sonsoro rural health facility were consulted and all uncomplicated and severe cases of malaria in local population between 2009 and 2012 were reported. For each malaria case, information on age, gender, origin of the patient were collected on electronic forms using tablets installed with Open Data Kit (ODK) Collect. Characteristics of patients positive to malaria, change in age groups and monthly variation were compared between the urban and rural health facilities. Of the 21,008 febrile patients consulted, a total of 7,990 cases (38%; 95% CI 37-39) were detected positive to malaria by the means of RDTs or microscopy. The number of confirmed malaria cases in rural and urban Kandi were respectively 2,911 (36%, 95% CI 35-37) and 5,079 (39%, 95% CI 38-40) (p<0.001). Severe cases were recorded at a lower frequency in the rural health facility, as compared to the urban one (1% vs 25%, p