Abstract
Fight the Bite represents the Department of Health's first attempt to actively raise awareness and improve prevention practices related to mosquitoes in Western Australia (WA). The multi-faceted campaign model involved a range of stakeholders and delivery methods over a 2 year period, achieving a recall rate of 8.2% among 2,500 survey participants. Significant regional differences were noted in campaign exposure, reflecting the variation in mosquito management issues throughout the State, and subsequent engagement by local government. Of those individuals with campaign recall, 43.8% reported an increase in awareness and 27.4% reported a change in behavior, which equated to a 1.7 and 1.2% change across the total survey population, respectively. The results of this study demonstrate that Fight the Bite has significantly improved awareness and prevention practices among those individuals who were exposed to the campaign. This was particularly promising, given the modest budget, resources, and time period over which the campaign was run prior to evaluation. This outcome means that Fight the Bite can be confidently adopted as a proven and standardized but regionally adaptable campaign approach to raising awareness about mosquito avoidance and mosquito-borne diseases by the Department of Health and its stakeholders. Future campaign aims include increasing reach through heightened and sustained promotion of Fight the Bite by both the Department and local government, as well as expanded collaboration with a range of stakeholders within the community.
Highlights
Mosquito-borne diseases pose a major threat to public health [1]
This paper reports the results of an evaluation survey undertaken after a 2 year pilot period, to determine the efficiency and effectiveness of the campaign model and the impact it has had on public awareness and prevention practices in relation to mosquitoes in Western Australia (WA)
While Fight the Bite (FTB) was originally developed by the Government of South Australia (SA Health), permission was given to the Department to roll the campaign out in WA, tailor existing resources and develop a range of new initiatives that would meet the state’s unique mosquito management requirements
Summary
Mosquito-borne diseases pose a major threat to public health [1]. In Australia, local mosquitoes can transmit Ross River virus (RRV), Barmah Forest virus (BFV), West Nile virus (Kunjin substrain) (WNVKUN), and the potentially fatal Murray Valley encephalitis (MVE) virus [2]. In the past two decades, there has been significant global growth in our knowledge of interventions required to raise awareness and change health behaviors related to specific aspects of mosquito management. This has largely been limited to the use of community-based interventions aimed at controlling populations of container-breeding vector species through source reduction, and reducing the incidence of mosquito-borne diseases such as dengue and malaria through insecticide treated bed net usage [4,5,6,7,8,9,10]. There remains a general paucity of data in relation to the importance of incorporating an all-encompassing communication strategy into mosquito management programs
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