Short and long-term effects of a health education intervention on helminth infection and absenteeism rates in Grade 5 students of the Peruvian Amazon
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Soil-transmitted helminth (STH) infections (which include Ascaris, Trichuris and hookworm infections) cause significant morbidity in school-age children around the world. Health hygiene education is recommended as an essential component of school-based STH control programs, and is considered to be an important tool in maximizing the health impact of deworming interventions in school-age children. The short and long-term effects of a Grade 5 health hygiene education intervention trial implemented in 2010 in 18 schools of the Peruvian Amazon were examined in two ways. First, data from the cluster randomized controlled trial were analyzed to assess the specific effects of the intervention on absenteeism rates of Grade 5 children. Students (n = 517) attending nine randomly selected schools had been exposed to four months of health hygiene education while students (n = 571) attending nine other schools served as controls. The percentage of schooldays absent during a four-month follow-up period was not found to be significantly lower in intervention students compared to control students (12.93% [95% CrI: 8.84%, 17.25%] vs. 12.00% [95% CrI: 6.95%, 16.99%]). However, students with moderate-to-heavy Ascaris infections and light hookworm infections had, respectively, missed 2.38% (95% CI: 0.06%, 4.69%) and 4.62% (95% CI: 1.88%, 7.36%) more schooldays than uninfected students. Second, a cross-sectional study was conducted (in 2012) to compare the behaviours of Grade 6 students whose school had most adhered to the health hygiene education intervention during their previous academic year (n = 44) to those of Grade 6 students whose school had least adhered to the intervention during their previous academic year (n = 43). Previous exposure to the health hygiene education intervention was found to have lowered the odds of practicing risk behaviours associated with STH infections and absenteeism, such as walking barefoot (aOR = 0.27; 95% CI: 0.11, 0.68) and not washing hands before eating (aOR = 0.31; 95% CI: 0.11, 0.96). These results support the inclusion of health hygiene education as an essential component of sustainable STH control programs. They also suggest that, over prolonged time periods, health hygiene education can lower the risk of STH infection acquisition and absenteeism in school-age children.
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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".