Foot and mouth disease in Ethiopia: a systematic review and meta-analysis in the last fifteen years (2007–2021)

Abstract

About 83 reported articles were retrieved and sorted from various database sources. Twenty of the articles were excluded during the initial screening due to inappropriateness of abstract and title by manual tracing. Further, 63 articles were subjected to inclusion criteria. Among these, 27 articles were removed due to the presence of an unrepresentative sample, redundancy of reports and inadequate methodology. Inadequate methodology includes poor sampling strategy, data management and presentation of results. The remaining 36 articles were again tested for sample size and 9 articles were dropped due to small sample size where the studies were only based on molecular characterization. Thus, only 27 full-length studies which met the eligibility criteria for the systematic review and meta-analysis (Fig. 1) were incorporated into the analysis of the pooled prevalence of foot and mouth disease.