Background STIs have been conventionally recognized as a major public and social health problem for a number of years. 1 STIs remain one of the major causes of acute illness and morbidity over the world. 2 More than 1 million STIs are acquired every day 3 and over 100 million STIs occur each year under the age of 25. 4 In 2015, 36.7 million people had HIV. 5 WHO estimate that 400,000 new cases of STIs daily occur in South East Asia Region (SEAR). Centre of Disease Control estimate that 19 million new infections occur each year, almost half of them among young people age 15-24. 6 In Nepal, the prevalence of HIV among 15-49 years of the age group is 0.17% 7 and practice of teenage marriage is high in Bajhang, Nepal. Hence this study is conducted to assess the awareness and knowledge about STIs. Objectives i. To determine the knowledge and awareness about Sexually Transmitted Infections among higher secondary school students. ii. To determine the relationship between socio-demographic factors and knowledge of STIs among higher secondary school students. iii. To study the perception on school sexual health education program among higher secondary school students and teachers. Materials & method This is a cross-sectional study design, conducted in Bajhang, Nepal and duration of the study was from January to May 2017. Study population was Government higher secondary school students of grade XI and XII. Ten schools were taken out of 29 school of district. And entire universe of teachers of these higher secondary schools of Bajhang were selected to determine the perception about sexual health education program. Multistage sampling method followed by simple random sampling technique was used to collect the primary data with sample size of 504 by using semi-structured self-administered pretested questionnaire. The data has been analyzed in SPSS version 16.00 and MS-Excel. Results The respondents were in the age group of 15-27 years with mean age 17.66 and standard deviation SD±17.66. Out of the selected participants 51% (258) were from the class XI and 49% (246)
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