Malaria literacy among people living in Namtu township, Northern Shan state, Myanmar

Abstract

Namtu township is one of the malaria endemic areas in Myanmar. The context with armed conflict, mobile/migrant people and hard-to-reach villages can lead to malaria outbreak and such conflict can interfere the service of providers and people's accessibility. The cross-sessional study was conducted to explore the level of malaria literacy in Namtu township and its related factors. A total 208 respondents were recruited from 6 villages of the studied township. The data was collected by using face-to-face interview questionnaires. Descriptive statistics and Chi-square test were used to analyze the data. The age of respondents ranged from 18-83 years old, with mean of 42 years old. Most of the respondents had finished primary and middle school (34.6% and 39.4%) and half of respondents (49.5%) are forest goer. Most of the respondents were Kachin and Shan ethnic groups and average monthly income of the respondent is 126,000 MMK. The result showed that 40.9% of the respondents had high level of malaria literacy in Namtu township. Regarding each component of malaria literacy, 48.6% and 74.5% of respondents had a high level of accessibility and practice about malaria, respectively while only 20.7% and 19.7% of respondents had high level of understanding and appraisal, respectively. The factors that were significantly associated with malaria preventive behaviors were level of education, language, population movement, race/ethnicity and employment (p-value<0.05). Social support and all components of social support were also significantly associated with malaria literacy (p-value<0.001). IMPLICATION OF THE THEMATIC PAPER. From the result of this study, Shan ethnic group is needed to increase the level of malaria literacy and malaria service providers need to disseminate the information related to malaria, diagnosis, treatment and prevention methods in pamphlet or brochure by using Shan dialect and promoting malaria services during religious events. Other than that, forest goer and miner are needed to raise their level of malaria literacy and malaria service providers should give priority to those people.