ABSTRACT
Background: Pertaining to increasing incidence of HIV/AIDS among youths, it becomes a need of the hour to make them aware about every aspects of disease. Students of secondary and higher secondary school can be targeted for achieving this goal. The objective of the study was to assess the knowledge about HIV/AIDS among the school students before and after giving educational intervention.Methods: An educational interventional study was carried out among school going adolescents of one of the school situated in the field practice area of one of the rural teaching hospitals of Gujarat. Pre-designed and pre-tested proforma was used for pre and post test study. Educational intervention in the form of power point presentation was conducted on various aspects of HIV/AIDS.Results: Around 163 students participated in the study. Mean age of the students were 16.6±0.7 yrs. Among them, 148 (90.8%) have heard about HIV/AIDS and only 26.3% could tell correctly about full form of HIV/AIDS before intervention. After giving educational intervention this percentage was raised to 89.2% which was significant statistically. Knowledge on almost all the aspects viz. modes of transmission and preventive aspects were significantly raised among the student after giving educational session.Conclusions: Correct knowledge about etiological and preventive aspects were lacking among the students before intervention. Various misconceptions which were prevalent among them were cleared by giving educational intervention. Secondary and Higher secondary schools can be selected as a platform for raising overall awareness about HIV/AIDS.
ABSTRACT
Background: A school is a key location for educating children about health, hygiene and nutrition, and for putting in place interventions to promote the health of children. Objectives: of current study were 1) To study the socio demographic profile of children of boarding schools. 2) To study the growth, nutritional and hygiene status of children of boarding schools. Methods: The study was a cross sectional study. After taking the permission of principal of resident schools and consent of the parents of children, 867 children from 8 boarding schools were interviewed during February-March 2011. A self-administered questionnaire was used for data collection. Results: Age of the study children (total 867) ranged from 5-19 years. (Mean age = 13.80 ± 1.96 years). Out of 867, 434 (49.9%) were boys and 433 (50.1%) were girls. 32.6% belonged to socio economic class IV. There were only 122 (14.1%) children who had been in boarding school since 4 and more than 4 years. Good personal hygiene was observed in only 75 (8.7%) children followed by fair personal hygiene in 292 (33.7%) children and poor personal hygiene in 500 (57.7%) children. 220 (50.8%) female children had fair personal hygiene and 343 (79.0%) male children had poor personal hygiene and this difference was statistically significant. Prevalence of malnutrition in this study was 7.2% (Females = 4.2%; Males = 10.1%; P <0.001).The bulk of the malnutrition cases were constituted by the grade-I P.E.M. cases (66.1%) followed by grade-II P.E.M. cases (25.8%) and there were 5 (8.1%) cases of grade-III malnutrition only in female children. Conclusion: Poor personal hygiene, poor nutritional status among these children needs great attention and health education.