Socioeconomic determinants of community knowledge and practice in relation to malaria in high- and low-transmission areas of central India

Abstract

This study was undertaken with an aim of exploring community knowledge and treatment practices related to malaria and their determinants in high- and low-transmission areas of central India. A community-based cross-sectional study was carried out between August 2015 and January 2016 in two high- and two low-malaria-endemic districts of central India. A total of 1470 respondents were interviewed using a pre-tested structured interview schedule. Respondents residing in high-transmission areas with higher literacy levels, and of higher socioeconomic status, were found to practise more modern preventive measures than those living in low-transmission areas with low literacy levels and who were economically poor. Level of literacy, socioeconomic status and area (district) of residence were found to be the main factors affecting people’s knowledge of malaria aetiology and clinical features, and prevention and treatment practices, in this community in central India.

Malaria treatment-seeking behaviour and its associated factors: A cross-sectional study in rural East Nusa Tenggara Province, Indonesia

“…This study shows that adults with no education were three times higher to have poor understanding compared to adults with a diploma or above education level. These results were consistent with other studies in other countries such as Myanmar [42], India [46], and Northern Ethiopia [47]. This is more likely adults with a low level of education have poor knowledge on when and where they have to seek treatment for malaria since they have no ability to understand various written health information to improve their health behaviour.…”

“…Socio-demographic and environmental covariates that have shown the association with careseeking malaria treatment were gender [42], age group [42][43][44][45]; education level [42,46,47]; social-economic status (SES) [46,48]; occupation [46]; income [49]; family size [43]; types of health facilities [41], distance to the health facilities [16,49,50]; and ethnicities [48,51]. In this study, gender was classified as males or females.…”

Malaria awareness of adults in high, moderate and low transmission settings: A cross-sectional study in rural East Nusa Tenggara Province, Indonesia

“…This finding was consistent with another study in Southern Africa [45] that revealed that residents in high MES had lower malaria knowledge compared with those in low MES. However, this finding was contrast with study in China [37], Bangladesh [22], Eritrea [46], North Sudan [47] and India [48] revealing that high malaria knowledge for rural population in high MES. This discrepancy might be explained with the fact that the rural community in those countries had been exposed with various interventions to improve malaria knowledge [22, 37, 38, 46, 47, 49] and in China, the government had included malaria awareness index as one of the action plan for malaria elimination since 2010 [50].…”

Socio-economic and household determinants of malaria in adults aged 45 and above: analysis of longitudinal ageing survey in India, 2017–2018

“…In addition, housing factors have also been shown to play an important role in malaria transmission [ 15 , 16 ]. In India, studies on socio-economic and household determinants of malaria are very limited, and are focused on selected districts [ 14 , 17 – 19 ]. Type of house, toilet facility and water-source were the major housing risk factors [ 17 ], while, social groups, family size [ 14 ], monthly income [ 18 ] were some of the key socio-economic determinants reported in these Indian studies.…”