Abstract
Dengue fever (DF) is increasingly recognized as one of the world's major mosquito borne diseases and causes significant morbidity and mortality in tropical and subtropical countries. Dengue fever is endemic in most part of Pakistan and continues to be a public health concern. Knowledge, attitude and practices can play an important role in management of the disease. Current study was aimed to determine the level of knowledge, attitude and practices regarding dengue fever among health practitioners, to study the level of knowledge and attitude with preventive practices for dengue fever. A cross sectional study was carried out in medical practitioners of the four districts of Malakand region during October to November 2019. A pre-structured questionnaire was used to collect data from medical practitioners. Data was analyzed using Graph Pad version 5. Significant value was considered when less than 0.05 (at 95% confidence of interval). The results revealed that most of participants have seen dengue vector (62%), the media being the most quoted source of information. Nearly 81.2% participants were aware from transmission of dengue fever is by mosquito bite. Practices based upon preventive measures were found to be predominantly focused towards prevention of mosquito bites rather than elimination of breeding places. Although the knowledge regarding DF and mosquito control measure was quite high among the medical practitioners but this knowledge was not put into practice. Further studies are required to aware the people about dengue and its vector in order to get prevention and control.
Highlights
Dengue fever is an epidemiological infection that is closely similar to symptoms of yellow fever (Paul et al, 1998)
The first part concerned with the demographic status of the medical practitioner of Malakand region Pakistan, the second part concerned with knowledge of the respondents related to dengue vector among health practitioners of four districts of Malakand region, the part dealt with knowledge of the respondents related to dengue fever among health practitioners of four districts of Malakand region, and the last part dealt with attitude of the respondent related to practice and prevention of the dengue fever
Knowledge of mosquito breeding site were asses in this paragraph, according to the current study most of the participants were voted to clean water for mosquito breeding site (64.9%), dirty water 25.8%), puddles (6.25%) and garbage (2.91%) according to this data most of the medical practitioners were aware of the breeding site of mosquito, the finding of the current study were not comparable with the other study which were conducted at other areas like Khalil et al (2016) Arif et al (2015) and Itrat et al (2008) this deviation may due to the selected population in the current study we are selected the health
Summary
Dengue fever is an epidemiological infection that is closely similar to symptoms of yellow fever (Paul et al, 1998). Dengue is a mosquito born viral infection found in tropical and subtropical regions of the globe and continuously spreading all over the world. Dengue fever is transmitted by the bite of female mosquito caused by human viral pathogen that belongs to the genus Flavivirus of the family Flaviviridae (single-strand, non-segmented RNA viruses) which is closely similar to West Nile virus (Luqman et al, 2013). Outbreaks in the three continents indicate a worldwide distribution of these viruses and their mosquito vectors presence in the tropics. A pandemic situation was adopted in Southeast Asia soon after World War II and since has spread around the world (Halstead, 1980; Halstead, 1992)
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