Malaria Related Knowledge and Child to Parent Communication Regarding Prevention and Control of Malaria among Primary School Students in Jimma Zone, South West Ethiopia

Abstract

Background: Malaria still imposes an enormous burden in terms of morbidity and loss of life. It is assumed that school based health education can help to promote community wide awareness and prevention of malaria. But, evidence is limited on the extent to which school children are equipped with appropriate and scientific information about malaria and communicate with their parents. Objective: To assess malaria related knowledge and child to parent communication regarding prevention and control of malaria among primary school students. Methods: Institution based cross sectional study was conducted in three selected Woredas of Jimma zone, south west Ethiopia from march, 15 to 30, 2014. The study recruited 432 samples of school children in 10 selected schools from the three woredas. A multi stage sampling method followed by simple random sampling was carried out to select the samples. The data were collected using pretested structured questionnaire adapted from similar studies. EPI-DATA version 3.1 was used to enter the data and data was exported to SPSS version 20.0 for further statistical analysis. Bivariate and multivariate analyses were used. Adjusted odds ratios and their corresponding 95% confidence intervals were used to assess the association between individual variables with the outcome variable in the multivariate analysis with a p-value of (< 0.05). Result: The mean score of students for comprehensive knowledge related to malaria was 6.13+ 1.88. The major source of information was radio (42.2%). Nearly half (49.5%) of students communicate with their family about malaria and the major areas of communication were concerning symptoms and prevention and control methods. Age [AOR, 95% CI, 1.18 (1.04, 1.34)], comprehensive knowledge [AOR, 95% CI, 1.34(1.19, 1.50)] and perceived parental readiness to learn from children [AOR, 95% CI, 2.09 (1.43, 3.06)] were independent predictors of child to parent communication. Conclusion: In this study comprehensive knowledge about malaria was found to be high among the students. However, knowledge gap about the cause and transmission were also observed among the students. Malaria health education should be strengthened in the schools to advance malaria knowledge and foster communication behavior of the students and health facilities should give attention for schools through equipping teachers with information about malaria prevention and control strategies so that such knowledge could be passed on to students.