There has been a considerable decrease in ARI in children younger than five years in Ethiopia between 2005 and 2016. However, this reduction has not been seen similar across the study locations. There were consistent hot spot areas in the Northern part of the country. Clusters, where a large proportion of households used biomass fuel for cooking and a large proportion of children did not commence breastfeeding immediately one hour after birth; have a positive association with ARI in much of Northern and some of the Western parts of the country.
Our results suggest the overall prevalence of ARI in children younger than 5 years has significantly decreased by about 48% between 2005 and 2016. Likewise, globally there is a decline in respiratory infections by 21.8% between 1990 and 2016 among children younger than five years (1). The study from the Zambian demographic and health survey also shows a decline in ARI between 1996 and 2014 (25).There are a number of possible explanations for the decline in ARI observed globally, including improvements in socio-economic status, child nutrition, Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) control, improved case management of ARI, and availability of vaccines (26).
Global Action Plan for the Prevention of Pneumonia and Diarrhoea (GAPPD) is a strategy recommended by World Health Organization aiming to reduce childhood death due to pneumonia and Diarrhoea (27). The GAPPD is an integrated approach that ensures every child has access to proven and appropriate preventive and treatment measures for ARI. The GAPPD strategies include promoting: (1) exclusive breastfeeding and adequate complementary feeding to protect children from pneumonia; (2) vaccination; (3) hand hygiene; (4) reductions in household air pollution; (5) HIV prevention; (6) co-trimoxazole prophylaxis for HIV infected and exposed children; and (7) treatment of childhood pneumonia with antibiotics and oxygen. Ethiopia is implementing this strategy since 2015 and the overall achievement of the GAPPD is improving.(8) However, GAPPD implementation showed that Ethiopia is far from reaching the target set by WHO (27). Ethiopia has made impressive gains in child survival related to ARI through the implementation and scale-up of IMNCI and community case management of ARI (28).
Even though the magnitude of ARIs was decreasing in Ethiopia, there is a large variation at Zonal (district) levels across the study locations. For example, in 2016 the prevalence of ARI ranges from 1–20% in some districts of the country. This spatial variation in ARIs was evidenced by Moran’s I statistics which show strong clustering of ARI and the hot spot analysis which detected consistently districts in the Northern part of Ethiopia in all three surveys and the central part of the country in the 2016 survey.
Direct comparisons of the spatial variations and the impact of risk factors on ARI between studies are difficult because of differences in definitions of ARI, analysis methods, and study participants. However, the existence of spatial variations in hospitalization due to pneumonia has been noted among children younger than 5 years hospitalized for severe pneumonia in Brazil (29) and Bhutan (30). Longitudinal data from Ethiopia between 2009 and 2017 shows that ARI is still a major cause of death in under five years children (31). Therefore, Ethiopia needs to strengthen the GAPPD strategy to overcome the spatial variations observed in ARI across the study districts.
The eigenvector spatial filtering model reveals that the spatial variations in ARI among children age younger than 5 years were likely to be affected by the majority of households that use biomass fuel for cooking and the majority of children who did not commence breastfeeding immediately after birth. In addition, the M-SVC model showed these two risk factors have a strong impact on acquiring ARI. A Previous study from Ethiopia indicated that biomass fuel has been associated with ARI among children younger than five years. (4) Meta-analysis of 8 studies from Ethiopia found that child holding during cooking and using unclean sources of energy for cooking are significant predictors of ARI (3). Data from Zambia’s demographic and health surveys show using charcoal or wood for cooking increases the risk of developing ARI as compared to those who use electricity (25). In Ethiopia, biomass fuel is burnt in open fires indoors. The burning of biomass fuel in unventilated indoors, results in a significant concentrations of hazardous pollutants, carbon monoxide, particulate matter, nitrogen oxide and polyaromatic hydrocarbons, leading to household air pollution and children experiencing high exposure (32). Therefore, a rapid increase in the use of modern biomass technology to ensure clean and efficient use of energy needs to be a priority agenda for policymakers.
Children who were breastfed within 1-hour of birth had a statistically significant association with ARI and the effect spatially varies across the geographic location. The effect is strong in many of the Northern, some parts of the Southern, and some Western parts of the country. Our spatial analysis did not find any evidence of an association between exclusive breastfeeding and ARI. However, evidence from Ethiopia shows both early initiations of breastfeeding and exclusive breastfeeding are associated with a lower risk of ARI (16) and evidence from Zambia indicated that exclusive breastfeeding is a significant predictor of ARI (25). The first breast milk contains colostrum, which is highly nutritious and has antibodies that provide immunity to the child and assist in the maturation of the child’s immune system to protect the newborn from infections (33). We were not able to show an association between exclusive breastfeeding and ARI. Similarly, mother-child cohort study failed to show an association between the duration of breastfeeding and the longitudinal pattern of respiratory infection, but the study show duration of breastfeeding has a protective effect only throughout the first year of life (34).
Previous research has indicated that wasting(6), stunting (3), and being underweight are predictors of ARI (25). The current spatial study showed that the risk of ARI in areas with a large proportion of wasting, stunting, and underweight was not statistically significant from what were in clusters with low a proportion of wasting, stunting, and underweight. Evidence suggests that increased risk of ARI in children depends on multiple risk factors, including, lack of vaccines (35), malnutrition (6) using unclean energy for cooking (4, 5), breastfeeding (16), overcrowding (36), low birth weight (37), and the existence of HIV (38). The lack of association between malnutrition and ARI might be explained by the fact that to develop ARI multiple risk factors must be present. Therefore, in our analysis, we lack control for some of these risk factors (potential confounders).
We did not observe evidence of a positive association between a low proportion of vaccine coverage and a high risk of ARI as expected. On the contrary, we observe a statistically non-significant negative association between vaccines and the risk of ARI. This result should be interpreted cautiously. Pneumococcal conjugate vaccines and Hib vaccines are known to effectively prevent ARI due to streptococcus Pneumoniae and Hib (35). However, in our study vaccines were not significant determinants of ARI at the cluster level. The following are possible explanations for this observed non-significant association. First; it may be a consequence of district-level aggregation of vaccines. Second; viral and atypical bacteria are common causes of ARI (39). A study from Morocco has shown that viruses are the predominant cause of ARIs in preschool children (40). Even though vaccines have played important role in preventing bacterial respiratory infections, there are non-vaccine pneumococcal serotypes responsible for ARIs (41). The negative association between vaccines and ARI might indicate that more children have ARI in areas where vaccine coverage is high, as compared to children living in areas where vaccine coverage is low. With this regard, there is a need to conduct further epidemiological studies for identifying aetiologies of ARI, particularly among vaccinated children.
We used data collected from nationally representative large geographic areas that enable the findings to be generalized across the country. This spatial study provides evidence of the important areas concerning ARI in children and its association with exposure variables, which supports public policies to reduce child mortality for the sustainable development goal
As a limitation, we utilized secondary data as such some known risk factors of ARI were not assessed. The outcome variable ARI was measured based on self-report from the mother leading to recall bias. The newest collected data was 6 years at the time of analysis. However, the results of this study are relevant for understanding the spatial variations of childhood ARI and its spatial predictors in geospatial areas.