ABSTRACT
Healthy Weight Week, January 19th-25th, 2014, celebrates healthy non-diet lifestyles that can prevent eating and weight problems. The prevalence of child obesity is increasing rapidly worldwide. The behavioral factors such as television watching, exercise, internet browsing, videogames and fast food consumption along with academic stress greatly contributes to obesity. Aim of our study was to impart knowledge, to create awareness on obesity and to correlate the BMI with their behavioral factors among 65 school children. After creating awareness and informing about their BMI they were asked to answer a questionnaire about their behavior pattern. The Karl Pearson correlation co-efficient was used for analysis of data, p<0.05 was considered statistically significant. The obese children correlated with more hours of television watching and less exercise. The number of hours of video games played and fast food consumption correlated well with the BMI. The academic stress negatively correlated with BMI. An awareness on BMI, obesity, fast food, exercising regularly, sedentary lifestyle created by television watching, playing videogames and internet browsing was done among the school children of Mangalore. The students gave feedback of usefulness of the program conducted on healthy weight week.
ABSTRACT
Background: Today vaccination is a very essential part of child’s health. Vaccination programme is the key step for the vaccine preventable diseases in children. Objectives of current study were 1. To assess the knowledge of mothers regarding selected vaccine preventable diseases and vaccination. 2. To find the effectiveness of teaching package on knowledge regarding selected vaccine preventable diseases and vaccination among mothers. 3. To find the association between pre-test knowledge score and demographic variables. Methods: An evaluative approach with quasi experimental - Two group pre-test and post-test design was adopted. The sample comprised of 100 mothers in selected hospitals of Mangalore who were selected by purposive sampling technique and assigned to control and experimental group. On first day pre-test was conducted with a structured knowledge questionnaire to both control and experimental group and teaching package was given only to the experimental group followed by post-test and information booklet to both the groups on 7th day. Results: The mean and standard deviation of post-test knowledge score of mothers in experimental group (27.80 ± 3.010) was much greater than pre-test value (10.44 ± 2.323). There is no change in pre and post-test knowledge score in control group (9.74 ± 1.805). The calculated’ value t98=34.54 was greater than the table value 1.68 at 0.05 level of significance. This indicates that the teaching package was effective in improving the level of mothers knowledge. Conclusion: The study findings concluded that the mothers were benefited by teaching package on vaccination and vaccine preventable diseases. Furthermore mass health education programs can be conducted to create awareness among general public.