Trends Of Acute Respiratory Tract Infections At The Agogo Presbyterian Hospital With The Introduction Of Pneumococcal Vaccine In Ghana

ABSTRACT Worldwide, acute respiratory tract infections is the most common cause of illness in children under five years of age and a major cause of death. Most (70%) of these deaths occur in African and Asian countries. The current study determined association between the introduction of pneumococcal vaccine into the Expanded Programmme of Immunization (EPI) and morbidities due to acute respiratory tract infections in the Agogo Presbyterian Hospital. The study was a retrospective study involving records of all children less than five years that reported with acute respiratory tract infections at the pediatric wards and the out-patients department of the Agogo Presbyterian Hospital from May, 2010 to April, 2014. The study population was made up of health facility records on the children. Inclusion criteria were all children under 5 years who received care and exclusion criteria were children with incomplete data related to age, sex, date of admission and date of discharge for acute respiratory tract infection. Data was collected and checked for accuracy and completeness before entries were done in Epidata version 3.1. After the double entries, the validated data was exported into STATA 12 for analysis. A total of 48,356 children attended the hospital during the period 2010-2014, out of which 5,550 records on children under five years were reviewed. A total of 4488 were children with respiratory tract infections and pneumonia was 616 for outpatients and 546 admissions. The children aged from 0- 59 months. The highest pneumonia admission was in children aged 11 months (39.75%). There were more male (54.02%) than female (45.98%) children, and the average duration of stay on admission was 4 days. The rate for respiratory tract infection was 17.8% and pneumonia outpatient was 2.33% and 10.45% for admissions. There was an increase in both respiratory tract infections and pneumonia cases after the introduction of the  pneumococcal vaccine and all the cases appear to be high in the month of October. There was a short term change after the introduction of the pneumococcal vaccine. It was concluded that acute respiratory tract infections increased after the introduction of the pneumococcal vaccine.