Diarrhea remains a significant public health problem and poses a considerable financial burden on Ghana's health insurance scheme. In order to prioritize district-level hotspots of diarrhea incidence for effective targeted interventions, it is important to understand the potential drivers of spatiotemporal patterns of diarrhea. We aimed to identify the spatiotemporal heterogeneity of diarrhea incidence in Ghana and explore how meteorological and socio-demographic factors influence the patterns.
We used monthly district-level clinically diagnosed diarrhea data between 2012 and 2018 obtained from the Center for Health Information and Management of the Ghana Health Services. We utilized a hierarchical Bayesian spatiotemporal modeling framework to evaluate potential associations between district-level monthly diarrhea incidence and meteorological variables (mean temperature, diurnal temperature range, surface water presence) and socio-demographic factors (population density, Gini index, District League Table score) in Ghana. In addition, we investigated whether these associations were consistent across the four agro-ecological zones.
There was considerable spatial heterogeneity in diarrhea patterns across the districts, with clusters of high diarrhea risk areas mostly found in the transition and savannah zones. The average monthly temporal patterns of diarrhea revealed a weak biannual seasonality with major and minor peaks in June and October, respectively, coinciding with the major and minor rainy seasons. We found a significant association between both meteorological and socio-demographic factors and diarrhea risk, but the strength and direction of associations differed across the four agro-ecological zones. Surface water presence demonstrated consistently positive, while diurnal temperature range and population density demonstrated consistently negative associations with diarrhea both overall and across the agro-ecological zones.
Although overall diarrhea incidence is declining in Ghana, our results revealed high-risk districts that could benefit from district-specific tailored intervention strategies to improve control efforts. Ghana health sector policy-makers can use these results to assess the effectiveness of ongoing interventions at the district level and prioritize resource allocation for diarrhea control.