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Malaria is one of the most sinister life-threatening disease and generally transmitted by the bite of an Anopheles mosquito which was infected. These mosquitoes carry the Plasmodium parasite. Worldwide risk of malaria thread is very hard to deal, because of extreme temperature and climate changes which lead to uncontrolled changes in the mosquito population, as many deaths from malaria occur outside the healthcare system and other infections might be misdiagnosed as malaria unless a diagnostic test is done. The purpose of this study is creating a system which is early diagnosing malaria for settlements adequate healthcare units and non-immune travellers.

In this study’s system, the authors developed a new medical expert system (MES) process using the decreased rule base to detect malaria. The authors’ purpose was to successfully identify the illness by taking all symptoms of malaria into consideration in the MES (six basic signs, 64 different conditions). In the proposed MES process, in place of inspecting all the malaria-related signs, the authors used the decreased rule bases.

So as to take the lessen decreased bases, Boolean functions are used in a two-level simplification method. Using this method, decreased cases were evaluated by taking six symptoms of malaria into account instead of assessing 64 individual conditions.

The system can be used in diagnosis of asthma and chronic obstructive respiratory disease.

The system can be used in absence of adequate healthcare units. Thus, malaria can be diagnosed early.

The authors hope that the system they have developed will be useful for settlements in the absence of adequate healthcare units and non-immune travellers.

This study assessed the effectiveness of malaria classroom corner (MCC), school-based intervention in the promotion of basic malaria awareness and common control practices among children of primary school age.

A quasi-experimental design was employed, involving 206 children of primary 5 and 6 classes from two randomly selected public primary schools in Owerri, South Eastern Nigeria. The MCC was designed and set up in the intervention school (with 103 children) while the control school (with 103 children) was offered malaria health talk. Structured pre-tested questionnaire was used to collect data pre- and post-intervention in both schools. Data was analysed using Statistical Package – Stata version 14.1 (Stata Corp, College Station, TX, USA).

Results show that there was a significant enhancement of basic malaria awareness (p = 0.0003) and common preventive and management practices (p = 0.0202) among children in the intervention primary school compared to those in the control primary school.

The study did not account for actual behaviour change, as its scope was within basic malaria awareness and common control practices.

This approach could enhance awareness and proactiveness of school children towards malaria prevention and overall health consciousness.

This could help in achieving a healthy population of school children with a positive effect on their school performance.

The MCC could provide a simple, participatory and effective approach for the promotion of basic malaria awareness and common control practices among primary school-age children in malaria endemic areas. Such children could, in turn, become malaria conversation drivers and behaviour change agents in their homes and communities, thereby contributing to the malaria elimination efforts.

The subsidization of artemisinin combination therapy (ACT) at supranational level to avoid undermining the private distribution system in sub‐Saharan Africa and elsewhere, as advocated by Committee on the Economics of Antimalarial Drugs board on Global Health, requires the appraisal of the economic behaviour of relevant private agents in these regions, in order to assess their potential influence on access to ACT. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the economic behaviour of informal medicine retailers and how this effects access to ACT, using data generated from a primary survey in southeast Nigeria.

A field survey was carried out which included health providers and households. A market price survey was undertaken to generate primary data, using closed and semi‐open questionnaires, and there were focus group discussions in two south‐eastern states in Nigeria. A standard two‐stage method was used for the design of the survey.

The study demonstrates that the economic behaviour of informal medicine affects market prices of ACT, facilitates information diffusion, improves availability and acceptability dimensions of access to ACT. However, their clinical practices are weak and require policy interventions.

This paper brings to the fore the influence of economic behaviour of retail agents in the medical market, which needs to be taken into account when considering alternative distributional channels for ACT, if the WHO goal of universal access in malaria‐endemic regions is to be achieved.

The purpose of this paper is to formulate an analytical framework for the information concept based on the semiotic theory.

The paper is motivated by the apparent controversy that still surrounds the information concept. Information, being a key concept within LIS, suffers from being anchored in various incompatible theories. The paper suggests that information is signs, and it demonstrates how the concept of information can be understood within C.S. Peirce’s phenomenologically rooted semiotic. Hence, from there, certain ontological conditions as well epistemological consequences of the information concept can be deduced.

The paper argues that an understanding of information, as either objective or subjective/discursive, leads to either objective reductionism and signal processing, that fails to explain how information becomes meaningful at all, or conversely, information is understood only relative to subjective/discursive intentions, agendas, etc. To overcome the limitations of defining information as either objective or subjective/discursive, a semiotic analysis shows that information understood as signs is consistently sensitive to both objective and subjective/discursive features of information. It is consequently argued that information as concept should be defined in relation to ontological conditions having certain epistemological consequences.

The paper presents an analytical framework, derived from semiotics, that adds to the developments of the philosophical dimensions of information within LIS.

The purpose of this paper is to reveal the bibliometric characteristics of highly cited articles in Malaria research for the period of 1991-2015.

The data of highly cited articles for the period of 1991 to 2015 were extracted from the Science Citation Index Expended of Web of Science. The keyword “Malaria” was used as topic term to search documents that contained this word in the title or keyword or abstract of the documents that published in 1991 to 2015. A total of 1,614 articles having TC₂₀₁₅ = 100 were retrieved as highly cited articles for further analysis, and Microsoft excel was used for the analysis purpose.

A total of 1,614 of highly cited articles were published in the 230 journals for the period of 1991 to 2015, and majority of the articles were appeared in journals that have top impact factor. The articles published in the 2011s have greater average citations and authors per article. Six journals have produced almost a quarter of highly cited articles and remaining articles were published in 224 journals. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA was the most productive journal with 154 articles, which accounts for 9.53 per cent of the total articles, followed by Lancet (110; 6.81 per cent). We found degree collaboration value of 0.971 for the articles, which indicates the clear dominance of multiple authors in publication of highly cited articles in Malaria research. In this study, new indictor called P index was applied for the evaluation of the author’s productivity. As per the p-value, the White, NJ has emerged as the most productive author with the p-value of 0.41 (61 articles), followed by Marsh, K (p = 0.33), Nosten, F (p = 0.32) and Snow, RW (p = 0.31). The USA and the UK were the most productive countries. The article entitled as “Global and regional burden of disease and risk factors, 2001: systematic analysis of population health data” contributed by Lopez et al. (2006) was the most cited article with 2,245 citations in 2015.

The data for the present study was limited to the publications that indexed in Science Citation index Expended of Web of Science.

This paper would be useful to the researchers to know the trends and achievements in the Malaria research and also to the library and information science professionals in collection building process.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate epidemiology and control strategies of the four priority vector-borne diseases (VBDs) in Nepal, i.e. malaria, Kala-azar (visceral leishmaniasis), lymphatic filariasis (LF) and dengue fever/dengue hemorrhagic fever.

The study was a retrospective design to collect data during 1998–2016 from VBDs endemic districts of Nepal. All data were reviewed and epidemiological information of the four VBDs were analyzed.

The number of malaria cases during 1998–2016 of the 13 affected districts was declined from 8,498 to 991 cases with no record of deaths since 2012. The number of cases and deaths in the 12 kala-azar (visceral leishmaniasis) affected districts in 1998 was 1,409 and 42 cases, respectively, but was dramatically decreased in 2016 to 213 and 2 cases, respectively. LF cases of the 61 affected districts in 2011, 2014 and 2016 were 28,855, 30,000 and 33,517 cases, respectively. In total, 25 districts achieved elimination target and the remaining are expected to complete the needful cycles by 2018. Dengue incidence of the 31 affected districts during 2006–2015 was under controlled with reported cases of 642, 356 and 136 cases in 2013, 2014 and 2015, respectively, and only one death in 2015. Implementation of control strategies particularly disease management and community peoples’ awareness significantly reduced the cases and deaths of the target VBDs.

The results of this study clearly suggest that the current control strategies have been worked effectively. However, in particular of the VBDs, health education in communities in the endemic areas should be adopted for better community participation in the context of the primary health care approach and increase the effectiveness of disease control.

VBDs, i.e., malaria, kala-azar (visceral leishmaniasis), LF and dengue fever/dengue hemorrhagic fever, are major causes of morbidity and mortality in the least developed countries which include Nepal. Globalization of travel and trading, unplanned urbanization, environmental and climate change are having a significant impact on disease transmission. Therefore, the Ministry of Health of Nepal had brought some changes in strategies based on activities for disease control, vector control, preventive and preparedness for outbreak response. Consequently, the cases and deaths due to malaria, kala-azar (visceral leishmaniasis), lymphatic filaiasis and dengue fever/dengue hemorrhagic fever have been brought down markedly.

The aim of this paper is to analyze Indian researchers' publications on malaria research and to serve as a guide to libraries needing to collect information on malaria. It also seeks to compare malaria affected Asian countries global rank with their publication and death rates.

For the purpose of the study Indian researchers' publication data which were indexed in Thomson Reuters Web of Science (WoS) were used. Various statistical techniques and bibliometric measures have been employed for further analysis.

The present study found out 2,020 documents with h-index of 48, published by Indian researchers which were indexed in WoS during 2003 to 2012 and the majority of them were articles (81.43 percent). Malaria Journal is the most favored research journal among the Indian research community which covers 97 papers. A.P. Dash contributed maximum number of 136 (6.74 percent) papers. Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) is the largest Indian funding agency with 184 (9.11 percent) research grants.

Limitation by geographical area and time, i.e. the study only focuses the research publication of Indian researchers on malaria research during 2003 to 2012.

This is the first attempt to apply bibliometric techniques to analyze malaria research by Indian researchers, and, more generally for a country which is very badly affected by the disease.

This study determined factors that influenced patients' knowledge, attitudes and practices (KAP) regarding uncomplicated malaria in primary healthcare (PHC) facilities of Plateau state, Nigeria.

The data of 956 patients treated for uncomplicated malaria in PHC facilities of Plateau state were used for the study. Inferential statistical analyses were conducted to identify factors that influenced patients' KAP on the disease and its management.

The study revealed age (p < 0.001), level of education (p = 0.012), attitudes (p = 0.007) and practices (p < 0.001) as significant predictors of knowledge outcomes on uncomplicated malaria, while their attitudes towards the disease and its management was predicted by their gender (p = 0.011), occupation (p = 0.049), monthly income (p = 0.018), knowledge (p < 0.001) and practices (p < 0.001). Furthermore, their practices were significantly predicted by monthly incomes (p = 0.043), knowledge (p < 0.001), attitudes (p < 0.001) and number of anti-malarial and adjunct drugs administered to them (p = 0.041).

The study revealed a mixed influence of patients' characteristics on their KAP outcomes. This calls for appropriate intervention measures towards achieving the desired patients' therapeutic outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to describe an AI (Artificial Intelligence) that can “think like an African traditional doctor”. The system proposes to model and to use attitudes taken and concepts used by African traditional doctors when facing cases. It is designed to go deep into the concepts of African traditional medicine (ATM) by dealing with all the possible interpretations of those concepts, and to produce more much satisfying and accurate support for medical diagnosis and prescription than existing systems.

To take into account the sometimes strange concepts used and attitudes taken by African traditional healers, including mystical considerations, the system relies on a deep ontology describing all those concepts and attitudes in a more computer readable manner allowing a multi-agent system to have full access to ATM knowledge. Ethnological inquiries, literary analysis and interviews of traditional doctors (the holders of African medicine knowledge) were performed to gather sufficient data to achieve the work.

The paper addresses this question of how to build a practical large-scope computer-aided diagnosis and prescription system which can exploit deep descriptions of ATM concepts, including mystical considerations. The system also provides scientific interpretations to some concepts sometimes considered as mystical facts. It is a java web-based platform combined to a Java Agent Development framework multi-agent system accessing an ontology to provide its results.

Because of the origins of healers involved in this research (from Gabon and Cameroon, countries of Central Africa), the ontology and the collected data may lack generalizability in the African scope and then it is a prototype. Therefore, ATM experts all over the continent are encouraged to participate to improve and standardize the ATM ontology and to populate the knowledge base. On the other side, the system cannot give scientific explanations to all the mystical considerations in ATM, there still some facts which cannot be rationally explained for now.

The paper demonstrates the practical usability of the implemented system on the diagnosis and the treatment of a patient case.

The research describes a system which once validated by traditional experts, will serve as a tool to assist them in their day-to-day diagnosis and prescription tasks and will also serve as a reference on ATM practices for all interested users.

The paper provides an in-depth description of a computer-aided diagnosis system (CADS) that promotes indigenous technology from an African perspective. Comparing to the former systems identified in the literature, the proposed system is the first which deals with believes and mystical considerations in ATM, and also the first which provides a function to rank its results.