A Model on Misdiagnosis of Pneumonia as Malaria

Pneumonia and malaria, the two leading causes of morbidity and mortality among Kenyans, often have overlapping clinical manifestations. Both of these diseases can be treated if diagnosed early, pneumonia with antibiotics and malaria with artemisinin- based combination therapy. However, because pneumonia presents with similar symp- toms as malaria, many people are treated inappropriately with anti-malaria drugs. This misdiagnosis is worrying because giving anti-malaria drugs to people with pneumonia delays their treatment with more appropriate drugs, increases morbidity and mortality rates due to pneumonia, and the increased risk of drug resistant malaria emerges. We develop a pneumonia-malaria model to investigate the eect of the dynamics of misdiag- nosing pneumonia as malaria. We focus on the transmission trends of the two diseases on the incidence of pneumonia misdiagnosis.