Diarrhoeal morbidity among young children in Eritrea: environmental and socioeconomic determinants.

Diarrhoeal disease is widely recognized as a major cause of child morbidity and mortality in many developing countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. In Eritrea, diarrhoeal disease is one of the most frequent causes of childhood and a major contributor to child mortality. Yet, except some descriptive reports by the National Statistics Office, no systematic univariate or multivariate analysis of the factors that influence the prevalence of diarrhoeal morbidity among young children exists in Eritrea today. The main purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of some environmental and socio- economic factors that determine childhood diarrhea in Eritrea. The data used come from the 1995 Eritrea Demographic and Health Survey (EDHS). The method employed is logistic regression. The results show that type of floor material, household economic status and place of residence are significant predictors of diarrhea. The study also discovers an important relationship between diarrhoeal morbidity and age of child and number of children living in the house with particularly high prevalence of diarrhea at the age of weaning and in households with large number of living children. However, the effects of toilet facility and maternal education were not found to be statistically significant when other factors are held constant.