Knowledge of Human Monkeypox and Its Relation to Conspiracy Beliefs among Students in Jordanian Health Schools: Filling the Knowledge Gap on Emerging Zoonotic Viruses

Abstract

Background and Objective: The recent multi-country outbreak of human monkeypox (HMPX) in non-endemic regions poses an emerging public health concern. University students in health schools/faculties represent a core knowledgeable group that can be helpful to study from a public health point of view. As future healthcare workers, assessment of their knowledge and attitude towards emerging zoonotic viral infections can be helpful to assess their taught material and courses with potential improvement if gaps in knowledge were identified. Therefore, we aimed to evaluate the level of HMPX knowledge, conspiracy beliefs regarding emerging virus infections, as well as their associated determinants among university students studying Medicine, Nursing, Dentistry, Pharmacy, Medical Laboratory Sciences, and Rehabilitation in Jordanian health schools/faculties. In addition, we sought to evaluate the correlation between HMPX knowledge and the extent of holding conspiracy beliefs regarding emerging viral infection. Materials and Methods: A convenient sample of university students was obtained through an electronic survey distributed in late May 2022 using the chain-referral approach. Assessment of HMPX knowledge and general attitude towards emerging virus infections was based on survey items adopted from previously published literature. Results: The study sample comprised 615 students with a mean age of 20 years and a majority of females (432, 70.2%) and medical students (n = 351, 57.1%). Out of eleven monkeypox knowledge items, three were identified correctly by >70% of the respondents. Only 26.2% of the respondents (n = 161) knew that vaccination to prevent monkeypox is available. Age was significantly associated with better HMPX knowledge for a majority of items. Older age, females, and affiliation to non-medical schools/faculties were associated with harboring higher levels of conspiracy beliefs regarding emerging virus infections. Our data also indicate that lower levels of HMPX knowledge were associated with higher levels of conspiracy beliefs. Conclusion: The current study pointed to generally unsatisfactory levels of knowledge regarding the emerging HMPX among university students in Jordanian health schools/faculties. Conspiracy beliefs regarding emerging virus infections were widely prevalent, and its potential detrimental impact on health behavior should be evaluated in future studies.

Study of knowledge, attitude and anxiety in Kurdistan-region of Iraqi population during the monkeypox outbreak in 2022

“…Place of residence also produced expected results; people living in the culturally and socially more developed province of Sulaimanyah demonstrated a higher level of knowledge, followed by Erbil, Duhok, and Halabja provinces. Contrary to our ndings, previous research (Alshahrani et al, 2022;Sallam et al, 2022) detected no signi cant differences by place of residence. The distinction between the ndings is related to the division of the variables into their components.…”

“…Although the pandemic seems to be recent, knowledge of the disease by ordinary people can help prevent its development. Our results coincide with previous research not only among ordinary people, but among Jordanian medical, nursing, dentistry, and pharmacy students (Sallam et al, 2022), Indonesian general practitioners (Harapan et al, 2020), Saudi physicians (Alshahrani et al, 2022), and Italian physicians (Riccò et al, 2022). These groups of the human population are considered to be knowledgeable as they belong to the health sciences and should possess information at least regarding health-related topics.…”

“…Moving on to the variation of knowledge based on the socio-demographic characteristics, our study demonstrated that there were highly statistically signi cant differences for all of them, namely age, gender, marital status, religion, level of education, and place of residence on the rst part of the knowledge scale that included questions about transmission, prevention, isolation, treatment, major symptoms, and source of information. Inconsistent with previous research (Alshahrani et al, 2022;Harapan et al, 2020;Sallam et al, 2022), male participants in our study reported a higher level of knowledge compared to females. One explanation for this can be attributed to the dominant role that men have in society and that they are more or less responsible for the fatal issues facing the community.…”

“…The reason why people have this relatively limited amount of information regarding the disease can be associated with the fact that the disease has not yet been reported in the Middle East, apart from a few rare cases in Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates (Alshahrani et al, 2022) and in the context of question. Additionally, the participants do not have experience with the disease and their knowledge is limited as knowledge of something can partially or partly stem from experience and the disease originates from central Africa (Sallam et al, 2022). Based on previous research (Harapan et al, 2020), the disease is a re-emerging disease in the world; that is, it emerges here and there every now and then.…”

“…However, a report by the World Health Organization (WHO) revealed that a lack of knowledge about monkeypox, especially among healthcare providers, was one of the obstacles faced in preventing the re-emergence of monkeypox (World Health Organization (WHO), 2017). The knowledge level about monkeypox is relatively low among Jordanian health students, general practitioners in Indonesia and physicians in Saudi Arabia (Alshahrani et al, 2022;Harapan et al, 2020;Sallam et al, 2022).…”