Climate Resilience of Public Health Preventive and Adaptive Measures Against Diarrhea in Northern Ghana: A Case Study of the Tamale Metropolitan Area

Abstract

Abstract Background Diarrhea remains one of the biggest public health threats in Ghana, and is the most common cause of morbidity and mortality among children in sub-Saharan Africa. Several preventive and adaptive public health measures, such as pneumococcal vaccination, Rota Virus vaccination, and improving access to potable water, are being implemented. Research exploring the climate resilience of preventive and adaptive measures in Ghana is sparse. This study aimed to determine whether preventative and adaptive interventions are climate resilient using morbidity data.Methods This study employs time series data of monthly all-cause diarrhea morbidity, rainfall, temperature, and relative humidity, spanning the period from January 2014 to December 2020. This study used the Auto Regression Distributed Lag cointegration approach to model the impact of climatic variables on all-cause Diarrheal Morbidity.Results The findings of the analysis demonstrate that public health prevention and adaptation strategies are climate-robust and unresponsive to changes in climatic variables. The residuals in the estimated models are white noise and do not exhibit serial autocorrelation or conditional heteroscedasticity.Conclusion In the Tamale Metropolitan Area, climate change does not affect diarrhea morbidity, supporting the claim that climate resilience is an important component of public health preventive interventions against diarrhea