Prevalence, knowledge, attitudes and practices regarding schistosomiasis among school-aged children in the Democratic Republic of Congo
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Schistosomiasis is a major public health problem in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). School-aged children constitute a high risk group and are the worst affected by this infection in Sub Saharan Africa due to poverty and precarious sanitary conditions. The air of this study was to determine prevalence of Schistosoma mansoni and assess knowledge, attitudes and practices (KAP) on schistosomiasis among school-aged children in Kisantu health zone. Methods & Materials: A cross-sectional study was carried out in Kisantu health zone in western DRC. 4 health areas were selected based on the level of the degree of urbanization. 362 school-aged children between 10 and 18 years old randomly selected were screened for S. mansoni using Kato Katz technique and were interviewed using a pre-tested questionnaire to collect information about the socio-demographic information and their KAP regarding schistosomiasis. Results: The prevalence of S. mansoni was 26.2%. Slightly more a quarter, 29% had heard about schistosomiasis and the main source of information was home 70.5%. Only 0.6% knew cause of schistosomiasis and 13.3% identified contact with water polluted by faeces/urine as a risk factor for contacting schistosomiasis. 76.5% of school-aged children reported going to river/lake and the main reason was for swimming 78.3%, then laundry 17.7%. Just over a quarter, 27.6% reported never use water from river/lake for domestic use. 76% reported never take tablets anti-schistosomiasis deworming and 94.5% reported never use protective waterproof clothes when in contact with water. Schistosoma presence was significantly associated to age (p = 0.02), educational level of school-aged children (p = 0.001) and parents (father p = 0.01, mother p = 0.02), to habits putting school-aged children to contact with water for swimming/taking bath in river (p < 0.001) and using water from river for domestic use (p < 0.001). Conclusion: Schistosoma mansoni infection still remains a public health problem in these areas. There is a need to incorporate in the school curriculum and community-based health education regarding schistosomiasis, to promote behavioral changes and eradication of snails in order to improve disease control.
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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 | 0.003 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| 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".