Effects of behaviour change communication: interventions for the prevention of bilharziasis in the districts of N’dali and Aguégués in Benin
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background The persistent endemicity of bilharziasis (schistosomiasis) in the districts of Aguégués (Agué) and N’dali underscores the need for targeted intervention. This study assessed the impact of a health education programme grounded in the behaviour change communication (BCC) framework aimed at improving awareness of health risks associated with poor hygiene practices. Objective To implement and evaluate an integrated communication model designed to promote behaviour change and reduce the incidence of urinary bilharzia in two endemic communities. Methods A quasi-experimental study was conducted involving 106 households, divided equally into control (n=53) and experimental (n=53) groups, with school-aged children (8–14 years). The intervention, delivered from January to June 2023, applied an integrated communication model based on Ajzen’s theory of planned behaviour. Community health relays conducted biweekly awareness sessions over 6 months to educate households. Data were collected using KoboCollect and analysed through logistic regression and multivariate analysis in STATA. Urine samples were collected for laboratory analysis using Plouvier’s filtration sensitivity test. Descriptive statistics and confidence intervals were calculated using Student’s t-test in SPSS. Relative risk was assessed based on an estimation of incidence among the separate groups. Results Overall, the incidence within the exposed group was estimated as 11.32%, compared to 24.53% within the non-exposed group. Reinfection rates were significantly associated with sex across study groups. Compared to girls, boys had higher reinfection rates in both the exposed group (boys: 7.54 %; girls: 3.77%) and non-exposed group (boys: 18.87%; girls: 5.66 %). The qualitative variables “duration of communication sessions,” “frequency of communication sessions,” “topics of communication sessions,” “past behaviour of the household,” and “household intention for behaviour change” were statistically significant (p < 0.01) and had an effect on reducing the incidence of bilharzia in the experimental municipalities of Aguégués and N’Dali. Furthermore, the intention of the target population of N’dali and Aguégués to adopt the expected behaviour was studied using a prediction test, with an estimated relative risk of 0.46 and a confidence interval (CI) [0.48-0.52]. Conclusion The study proved effective in promoting health-related behaviour change and reducing bilharzia incidence. The model is recommended for broader implementation in bilharzia-endemic areas.
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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".