Our finding that, the most common OI and symptoms
are weight loss, fatigue, nausea, appetite loss, diarrhoea,
skin infection and prolonged fever was consistent with
some previous studies in South Africa [40] and in Nigeria
[42]. Our results also suggest that, a lower percentage of
NCS recipients had sickness in the preceding 30 days, but
those that were sick had more severe illnesses. The possible
reason that may have influenced the severity of illness
in this group is the fact that about 5.4% (n = 5) of the NCS
recipients had received NCS for only 1–2 months. Given the
entry criteria, we would expect that the newly enrolled NCS
recipients would be worse off in terms of illness than non-NCS recipients would be. NCS recipients were also twice as
likely to report oral thrush. It may be that oral thrush was
the most important cause of reduced food intake and hence
weight loss (weight/BMI being used as inclusion criteria for
NCS) of most of the NCS recipients.