Malaria prevention and control behaviors among household leaders in endemic areas of Madaya township, Mandalay region, Myanmar

Abstract

The cross-sectional study aims to determine malaria prevention and control behaviors and to determine its associated factors. The subjects were 175 household leaders sampling from 3 endemic villages in Madaya township by simple random sampling. The interview was conducted face-to-face with structured questionnaire. Data were analyzed using percentage, mean, standard deviation and chisquare test. The result reveals that 72.6% of the respondents had malaria prevention and control behaviors at a poor level while 22.9% and 4.6% of them had malaria prevention and control behaviors at a moderate and good level, respectively. Details of the malaria prevention and control behaviors show that 92.6% of the respondents always sleep under bed net or Insecticide Treated Nets (ITN) at home and 70.9% went to the health facility or malaria volunteer to seek for screening and treatment of malaria. Regarding the knowledge of the respondents, 4% of the respondents had high level of knowledge while 78.9% had low knowledge level. In terms of perception level, it has been found that 93.7% of the respondents had high perception level. There is association between education, occupation, perception and malaria prevention and control behaviors (p=0.03, p=0.043, p<0.001), respectively. Based on the finding, malaria prevention and control program should be emphasized on the health education to improve the malaria knowledge and it should be extended to the risk groups such as forest workers, mining workers, migrant workers, and agricultural workers. Moreover, health education sessions in the community stage should be evaluated to know their effective malaria prevention and control activities. IMPLICATION OF THESIS Suggestions for further research 1. Qualitative method for data collection (focus group discussion and in-depth interview) should be done to have a better understanding about the phenomena of malaria prevention and control behaviors. 2. Comparative study on malaria prevention and control behaviors between the people who have history of malaria infection and the people who do not have history of malaria infection should be done.