Epidemiological Studies of Malaria Parasite on HIV Patients Attending General Hospital Awo-Omamma, Oru East, Imo State

HIV and malaria are the two most prevalent and deadly diseases in the world.  Malaria and HIV accounted for about 255 million cases in 2017, with malaria having 86% of this distribution and HIV having 14% of the distribution. Given the overlap of their geographic distribution and resultant rates of coinfection, interactions between the two diseases pose major public health problems. This study was aimed at investigating the epidemiology of malaria – HIV co-infection in respect to sex and age and its association with CD4+ count and viral load. 230 HIV sero-positive participants and 100 HIV sero-negative participants (control) were employed for this study. 52 (22.6%) of the HIV infected participants tested positive for malaria while only 9(9.0%) of the non-HIV participants tested positive to malaria. The prevalence of malarial infection in HIV positive individuals was shown to be higher in females (23.9%) compared to the prevalence for males (18.5%). In respect to age, the age group of 30-39 showed the highest prevalence (35.3%) of co-infection. A high prevalence of 47.7% was recorded in participants with CD4+ below 200 cells/μl compared to the prevalence of 7.6% in participants with CD4+ greater than 200 cells/μl. A high prevalence (49.2%) was also detected in patients with viral load of above 10,000 copies/μl compared to that of those with viral load less than 10,000 copies/μl (12.6%). The findings in this work show a high prevalence of malaria in HIV patients in Awo-Omamma, Oru East, Imo state. This should be considered a great concern to public health. Thus, more effort should be put in research to curb this health issue.&nbsp