The Effects of Household Environmental Factors on Residents' Health in Osogbo, Osun State, Nigeria
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Date
2015-05-08
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Abstract
This study examined the household environmental and socio-economic factors of residents in the low, medium and high residential areas in Osogbo. This was with a view to evaluating the impact of these factors on their health.
Data were collected in the purposively selected 94 buildings in the high residential density zone, 140 in the medium and 198 buildings in the low density, making a total of 432 buildings in the study area. These were taken from the selected 19 grids in the high density, 46 in the medium, and 60 in the low density, making a total of 125 grids in all. Osogbo representative map was georeferenced and converted to digital format using ILWIS 3.2 and later exported to ArcView 3.2 environment, where the data collected on each digitized sampled household, though questionnaire were attached as attributes to form database. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyse the data.
The study revealed that incidence of stomach ache (10.4%) and diarrhoea (10.4%) were higher among respondents living in the high residential densities. In addition, incidences of malaria (27.9%) diarrhoea (14.5%) and stomach ache (12.8%) were higher also in the high residential density than in medium and low residential densities. Respondents that depended on public tap water in the high residential density had higher incidence of typhoid (14.5%) than in the other residential densities. Among respondents that depended on plastic tanks as water storage facility, malaria (36.6%) and stomach ache (14.9%) were higher in the low than the high and medium residential density areas and, diarrhoea (9.8%), was higher among respondents that use galvanized tanks in the high residential density than other areas. Stomach ache (19.1%) and diarrhoea (18.0%) were higher among respondents that depended on pit latrines in the high residential density than in the other two residential densities. Also, malaria (43.8%) and typhoid (7.2%) were higher among respondents that dump their wastes on empty land in the medium residential density than in the other two residential densities. The study further showed that there exist significant differences between residential density and some environmental factors such as, household water sources (X2 = 92.739; p = 0.000), methods of in-house waste storage (X2 = 19.851; p = 0.011) and places of waste disposal (X2 = 19.028; p = 0.015).
This study concluded that environmental factors affected the health of residents in varying degree in the residential density areas, and more so in the high density area.
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Household environmental factors, Household socio-economic factors, Health of residents