Evidence on the Economic Burden of Repeat Malaria Episodes among Households in Rural Uganda

Abstract

Propensity score matching is used to investigate the economic burden of repeat episodes of malaria in rural Uganda on farm incomes and household food consumption expenditures. We also examine the impacts of: expenditure on mosquito bed-nets on the number of malaria episodes and access to microcredit on expenditures to prevent the disease. The findings show that annual farm income declines by about 50% due to severe frequent malaria episodes and the household expenditure on animal protein foods declines by 34%. Repeat malaria episodes among children and adults decline among users of bed nets by about 29% and 41%, respectively. Improved access to microcredit alleviates household liquidity constraints and enables households to increase their investment in preventive measures by over 62%. The results show that after controlling for household characteristics, malaria places a significant economic burden on rural households.

The role of gender on malaria preventive behaviour among rural households in Kenya

“…It was hypothesized that, unlike their poor counterparts, households with higher income are likely to adopt more malaria prevention practices, especially the purchased technologies such as window screens, and repellents because they may have liquid capital to purchase them. A recent study [ 27 ] shows that relaxing liquidity constraints can increase investment in malaria prevention in households. The effect of neighborhood experience on the adoption of malaria prevention interventions was captured in the model by using the proportion of households in the village that had adopted at least two categories of the integrated vector management (IVM) practices for mosquito control.…”

Impacts of Dengue Epidemics on Household Labor Market Outcomes

“…Assessments of the cyclical link between income and health are typically conducted at the macro-level and display mixed results about the magnitude of the causal effect of health on income, or vice versa (e.g., French 2012;Datta and Reimer 2013). A few studies look at the impact of malaria on agricultural productivity and rural income (e.g., Asenso-Okyere et al 2011;Kiiza and Pederson 2014). However, these studies are not directly applicable to understanding the household-level impact of dengue since dengue is an urban, rather than a rural disease.…”

“…For dengue, many studies include medical expenses and lost hours of work or schooling, but only among infected individuals and sometimes caregivers (Halasa, Shepard, and Zeng 2012). The same is true for the literature on Malaria (Kiiza and Pederson 2014). Bleakley (2010) defines the indirect costs of infectious disease as reduced productivity or human capital development in terms of the intensity of labor or ability to achieve cognitive gains from education among infected individuals.…”