Prevalence of malaria and comparative diagnostic performance of malaria rapid diagnostic test against microscopy in Nasarawa-west senatorial District, Nasarawa, Nigeria

Malaria is a vector-borne parasitic disease caused by Plasmodium species, and transmitted by the bite of an infected female anopheles mosquito. It remains a major public health challenge in Sub-Saharan Africa, a major cause of mortality and morbidity, especially in children and pregnant women. This study evaluated the prevalence of malaria and the comparative performance of rapid diagnostic test (RDT) against Microcopy, the gold standard. A total of 385 febrile consenting patients attending randomly selected health facilities in Nasarawa-West Senatorial District were recruited using simple random sampling technique. Malaria parasite tests were conducted using RDT and microscopy technique. Of the 385 samples tested, 115 (29.9%; 95% CI = 25.34 to 34.71%) were positive by microscopy and 103 (26.8%) were positive by RDT. The RDT had a sensitivity of 89.6% (95% CI = 82.48% to 94.49%), specificity of 100.00% (95% CI = 98.64% to 100.00%), Positive Predictive Value (PPV) of 100.00% (95% CI = 96.48% to 100.00%); and Negative Predictive Value (NPV) of 95.8% (95% CI = 92.94% to 97.46%). The accuracy of the RDT was 96.88% (95% CI = 94.62 to 98.38%). Thus, the high diagnostic performance of SD Bioline indicates that it can be effectively used for the diagnosis of malaria. Microscopy however, was able to detect a higher number of positive malaria cases thus implying that microscopy remains a better diagnostic tool for malaria parasite detection than the RDTs.