Development of an educational cartoon to prevent worm infections in Chinese schoolchildren

Abstract

BackgroundWith more than two billion people infected worldwide, soil-transmitted helminths (STH) are the most widespread infections. To date, STH control efforts rely predominantly on recurrent mass drug administration (MDA), which does not prevent reinfection. Additional public health measures including novel health educational tools are required for more sustained integrated control of STH. We describe the development of an educational cartoon video (The Magic Glasses) targeting STH infections in Chinese schoolchildren and its pilot testing in China.We applied an extensive community-based mixed methods approach involving input from the target group of 9–10 year old schoolchildren and key informants, such as teachers, doctors and parents, in order to identify potential STH infection risks in the study area and to formulate key messages for the cartoon. The development of the educational cartoon included three major steps: formative research, production, and pilot testing and revision.ResultsWe found that most adults and approximately 50% of the schoolchildren were aware of roundworm (Ascaris) infection, but knowledge of transmission, prevention and treatment of STH was poor. Observations in the study area showed that unhygienic food practices, such as eating raw and unwashed fruit or playing in vegetable gardens previously fertilised with human faeces, posed major STH infection risks.ConclusionsIt was crucial to assess the intellectual, emotional, social and cultural background of the target population prior to video production in order to integrate the key messages of the cartoon into everyday situations. Overall, our strategy for the development of the cartoon and its incorporation into a health education package proved successful, and we provide a summary of recommendations for the development of future educational videos based on our experiences in China.

Health education and the control of intestinal worm infections in China: a new vision

“…The approach is currently being tested in Côte d’Ivoire in West Africa and we will further expand into the Philippines in 2015. Future programs could also involve the integration of chemotherapy and health education with WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene) efforts to ensure access to clean water and good sanitation in addition to improved personal hygiene [14–16]. Ultimately, the work in China has the potential to be a model for other neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) because it illustrates the direct impact that health education can have in improving knowledge and awareness, and in changing hygiene behaviour, thereby reducing the chances of an individual becoming infected.…”

Impact of the “BALatrine” Intervention on Soil-Transmitted Helminth Infections in Central Java, Indonesia: A Pilot Study

“…In contrast, health education and promotion programmes can be highly effective at reducing the incidence of STH infections if designed appropriately such as the highly successful "Magic Glasses" study, which resulted in a 50% reduction in STH infections [36]. However, sustained reinforcement of health messages is required in order to increase their effectiveness over the longer term [37,38]. Ultimately, eliminating STH will be best achieved through integrated control programmes.…”

The gender responsiveness of social marketing interventions focused on neglected tropical diseases

“…Other words related to sex and gender used in the publications describing the interventions included female [64,66- [61][62][63]69,70,85,91,100]. None of the interventions made references to a third sex or to gender diverse people.…”

“…By gender, for example, by having gender-specific focus groups [66,89,90]. Twelve interventions reported data disaggregated by sex [66][67][68][69][70][71][75][76][77]79,80,[84][85][86][88][89][90]100,101] and four considered gender when interpreting it [67,84,85,90]. The gender responsive intervention is an example of how data collection and reporting can be disaggregated by sex and gender [67].…”

“…Disaggregated data was presented quantitatively in tables [67,75,77,84,90] and/or within the text [67,68,70,71,[75][76][77]79,80,[84][85][86]88,100,101,106], some did it using the labels 'sex' [71,75,79,90,102] and/or 'gender' [84,106]. Six described differences between female and/or male participants qualitatively [67,76,77,79,84,85,[88][89][90]101].…”