Perception and attitudinal factors contributing to periodic deworming of preschool children in an urban slum, Nigeria
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Over 20 million preschool-age children (PSAC) in Nigeria require periodic chemotherapy (PC) for soil-transmitted helminth (STH) infections. Persistently low coverage for this age group threatens the World Health Organization (WHO) 2030 target for eliminating STH infections. Current strategies for targeting PSAC have been largely ineffective. Hence, PSAC are mostly dewormed by their parents/caregivers. However, little is known of the perception and attitude of parents/caregivers of PSAC to deworming in this setting. METHODS: A mixed methods design, combining a community-based interviewer-administered questionnaire-survey (n = 433) and focus group discussions (FGD) (n = 43) was used to assess the perceptions and attitudes of mothers to periodic deworming of preschool children aged 2-5 years in Abakpa-Nike, Enugu, Nigeria. RESULTS: Coverage of periodic deworming in PSAC is 42% (95% CI: 37.3-46.8%). There is significant difference in the specific knowledge of transmission of STH (AOR = 0.62, 95% CI: 0.48-0.81, p = 0.000), complication of STH infections (AOR = 0.77, 95% CI: 0.61-0.98, p = 0.034), accurate knowledge of deworming frequency (AOR = 0.41, 95% CI: 0.18-0.90, p = 0.026), and knowledge of PC drug, mebendazole (AOR = 0.28, 95% CI: 0.09-0.90, p = 0.031), and pyrantel (AOR = 8.03, 95% CI: 2.22-29.03, p = 0.001) between mothers who periodically deworm their PSAC and those who do not. There is no significant difference in specific knowledge of the symptoms of STH infections (AOR = 0.76, 95% CI: 0.57-1.02, p = 0.069) and PC drug, Albendazole (AOR = 1.00, 95% CI: 0.46-2.11, p = 0.972). FGD revealed misconceptions that are rooted in stark ignorance of the disease. Overall attitude to deworming is positive and favourable. CONCLUSIONS: Poor coverage of periodic deworming for STH infections in PSAC in this setting are primarily driven by poor specific knowledge of the risks and burden of the infection. Focused health education on the burden and transmission of STH infections could complement existing strategies to improve periodic deworming of PSAC in this setting.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".