Background and aims of study: Malaria is a disease caused by protozoan parasites belonging to the genus Plasmodium. It is a major cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide, especially in young African children including Ethiopia. Therefore, this study designs to assess the prevalence of malaria infection among patients attending Gimbie Adventist Hospital in West Wollega, Oromia, Ethiopia. Method: Descriptive retrospective study was carried out on the hospital based records in the past ten years (2006-2016) for prevalence of malaria in the study area. Malaria suspected patients based cross sectional study was carried out from March to June, 2009. A random sampling technique was carried out to select representative study participants among the patients as well as structured questionnaires and blood sample examination was used for data collection. Every head of the randomly selected malaria suspected patients either female or male who attended Gimbie Adventist Hospital at the time of data collection for blood sample test were considered. Results: A total of 384 malaria suspected patients were recruited and ascertained for parasitaemia from the blood sample test. Out of this 108 patients were malaria positive. The overall prevalence of malaria was 28.1%, of which 58 (53.7%) were positive for P. falciparum and 34 (31.5%) for P. vivax and the remaining 16(14.8%) were mixed. Major Plasmodium species identified in this study was P. falciparum (53.7%). Out of the screened patients 69.2% responded to sleep under the ITNs the previous night. The coverage of IRs was observed to be 12.3%. The prevalence of malaria in males and females of the study population was 71(65.7%) and 37(34.3%) respectively. The greatest number of malaria cases recorded in the age group 16-30 was 52(48.1%). Conclusion: The higher prevalence could be the result of several factors as explained in this study. Therefore, effective malaria control measures should be implemented in order to reduce the prevalence of malaria infection among patients.

Keywords: Prevalence, malaria, gimbie, Plasmodium vivax, Plasmodium falciparum