# Cases of Guinea Worm Disease Among Al Sabah Children Hospital Attendees from January to December 2022, South Sudan

## TL;DR

This study found no cases of Guinea worm disease among children at a hospital in South Sudan in 2022, but notes the country may still have the disease.

## Contribution

The study provides recent data on Guinea worm disease absence in a specific hospital population in South Sudan.

## Key findings

- No sampled children had Guinea worm infection in 2022.
- Most hospital attendees were under 5 years old and female.
- The study could not determine the true national prevalence of the disease.

## Abstract

Guinea worm disease carries health risks with potential effects on social and economic wellbeing of an individual and community. Emergence, the fact of manually removing the worm, is slow, painful, and disabling and therefore, it has a serious adverse socioeconomic outcome on the health, agricultural productivity, and school attendance of affected population. This study was conducted to identify case of Guinea worm among children attending Al Sabah Children Hospital, South Sudan.

The study extracted register data which covered the period from January to December 2022. Using a systematic random sampling, 422 children were selected from the hospital’s Statistics Department of Al Sabah Hospital. Descriptive data analysis was performed using SPSS Statistics software.

Of the children who received hospital services, the vast majority (76.3%) were children <5 years old, and more than half were females. None of the sampled children had Guinea worm infection.

In 2022, none of the attendees of the Al Sabah Children Hospital was diagnosed with Guinea worm infection. But this does not mean that the country is free of the disease as the study design did not allow to establish true prevalence.