An analysis of a telephone survey on knowledge of iodine deficiency disorders in Shanghai residents / 中国地方病学杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective To find out whether Shanghai residents have mastered the knowledge related to iodine deficiency disorders (IDD),and how they choose different kind of salt.Methods Residents were selected by stratified random sampling from all 18 districts(counties) of Shanghai in 2010.Simple random sampling was used at the first level; random function was used at the second level to produce the last 4 numbers of a phone number.People who own the number were selected to be called.Results Totally 219 people completed the investigation.49.3％ (108/219) of the residents only selected iodized salt,and 25.6％(56/219) choose non-iodized salt; 6.8％ (15/219) selected both,and 18.3％ (40/219) don't care.About the reason of choosing iodized salt,25.9％ (28/108) thought it can prevent IDD,6.5％ (7/108) thought it's good to children's intelligence.About the reason of choosing non-iodized salt,35.7％ (20/56) thought they were not iodine deficiency,17.9％ (10/56) thought Shanghai was not an IDD epidemic region.Among the 126 people who had heard of iodine deficiency disorders,7.1％ (9/126) believed that iodine deficiency disorders can lead to varying degrees of mental impairment,65.1％ (82/126) thought it can lead to endemic goiter; 45.2％(57/126) thought eating iodized salt and 33.3％ (42/126) thought eating kelp and laver can prevent IDD.58％(127/219) had no idea of IDD and/or its hazards.Conclusions The resident's knowledge on iodine deficiency disorders is not satisfactory.We should make more effort in health education and help people to choose salt reasonably.