Competitive within-host interactions between coinfecting parasites in school-age children on the southern shore of Lake Malawi

This dataset and associated materials supports the manuscript "Competitive within-host interactions between coinfecting parasites in school-age children on the southern shore of Lake Malawi". Coinfection in the usual state of parasitic infections in humans and yet remains understudied compared to single parasite infection states. We investigated Schistosoma, Plasmodium and Giardia duodenalis in children attending school along the southern shoreline of Lake Malawi, to build on previously published parasite prevalence data in this cohort. Questionnaire and field diagnostic testing was carried out in November 2021 in Mchoka and Samama schools, on the south-western shoreline of Lake Malawi. Faecal samples stored in ethanol and dried blood spot samples stored on Whatman 3MM filter paper were transferred to the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine for DNA extraction and real-time PCR. Real-time PCR Ct values for parasite target DNA was normalised to β-globin reference gene Ct values (for Plasmodium) or universal bacterial 16s reference gene Ct values (for Schistosoma and G.duodenalis). Normalised values were used in a series of General Linear Models (GLMs) using each parasite's intensity as the dependent variable in turn, with the other parasites' abundance as independent variables alongside other epidemiological and behavioural data.This folder contains:The dataset used in analyses (pilotcoinfectiondata.csv)A key to the variables found in the dataset file (pilotcoinfectiondatakey.docx)An R script to reproduce GLMs reported in the associated manuscript as well as data visualisation. Analysis was conducted using Rstudio version 4.5.2A README.txt file containing Rstudio session information, including version details for all Rstudio packages used