Dante Christopher-Alphonso

This major research paper serves as an exploratory study of medical symptoms of malaria deaths in Sierra Leone. Malaria is an infectious disease that is caused by the Plasmodium parasite, commonly carried by Anopheles mosquitoes. Malaria a common disease in Africa, Southeast Asia, and South America, and is considered one of the most lethal diseases in many African countries. Due to the high mortality of malaria in poorer countries, it is necessary to study how malaria can be geographically analyzed from its symptoms, as patterns and implications can be derived from well-developed symptoms maps for future medical research. The data used in this paper makes use of the HEAL-SL dataset provided by the Centre for Global Health Research, and the data is processed through a coding-developed spatial aggregation pipeline that separates symptoms based on district, age and sex. The results of the study will highlight the spatial differences between malaria symptoms between certain age and sex groups, as well as how they differ from symptoms in other diseases which can aid in epidemiological studies.
Keywords: Malaria, Mortality, Spatial Analysis, R, Data Pipeline, Sierra Leone