Burden of intestinal parasitic infections among pregnant women in Ethiopia: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Background Comprehensive nationwide data on prevalence and distribution of intestinal parasites (IPIs) among pregnant women are lacking. Therefore, the aim of this study was to provide pooled prevalence estimate, prevalence in different regions and species-specific IPIs among pregnant women in Ethiopia. Methods The search was carried out in Medline via PubMed, Scopus, Science Direct, Web of Science and Google Scholar on published and unpublished data between 2008 and Sep 2020 for studies describing rate of IPIs among pregnant women in Ethiopian. A random-effects model and forest plots to estimate pooled effect size and effect of each study with their confidence interval (CI) were used to provide a visual summary of the data. We conducted meta-regression to understand the source of heterogeneity and pooled the prevalence using ‘metaprop’ command using STATA software version 14. Results A total of 3149 of the 9803 pregnant women were infected with one or more species of IPIs resulted in an overall prevalence of 29% (95% CI 22–37%). The prevalence estimate varied among studies with considerable heterogeneity ( χ 2 = 2069.19, p