Baseline prevalence and intensity of schistosomiasis at sentinel sites in Madagascar: Informing a national control strategy

BACKGROUND: Schistosomiasis affects more than 800 million people, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. A baseline sentinel site study was conducted in the Western half of Madagascar to determine the prevalence and intensity of schistosomiasis and soil-transmitted helminth (STH) infections prior to mass drug administration, and to explore the associations between infection and school attendance, and access to water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) facilities. METHODS: A three-stage, cluster-randomised cross-sectional study was conducted in 29 sentinel sites in October 2015. Twenty school attending and 4 non-attending children in each of the age groups from 7 to 10 years old were randomly selected at each site for detection of Schistosoma haematobium eggs in a single urine slide by filtration, and of S. mansoni, Ascaris lumbricoides, Trichuris trichiura and hookworm eggs in duplicate Kato-Katz slides from a single stool sample. School attendance was registered individually, and school-level access to WASH facilities was scored through pre-defined observed and reported factors. Logistic regression analysis was performed, adjusting for gender, age and study site. School-level WASH status was analysed using Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient. RESULTS: A total of 1,958 children were included. The prevalence of S. haematobium infection and heavy-intensity infection was 30.5 % and 15.1 %, respectively. The prevalence of S. mansoni infection and heavy-intensity infection was 5.0 % and 0.9 %, respectively. The prevalence of any STH infection was 4.7 %. There was no significant difference in prevalence of infection or heavy-intensity infection of either schistosome species between attending and non-attending children, apart from heavy-intensity S. mansoni infection that was significantly more common in children who did not attend school regularly (aOR = 7.5 (95 % CI = 1.1-49.5); p = 0.037). Only a minority of schools had adequate access to WASH facilities, and in this study, we found no significant association between school-level WASH status and schistosomiasis. CONCLUSIONS: This study found an alarmingly high prevalence and intensity of schistosomiasis, and the results warrant urgent scale-up of the national NTD control programme that will need to include both non-attending and attending school-age children in order to reach WHO roadmap targets for the control of schistosomiasis by 2020. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13071-016-1337-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.