Abstract:
Malaria is a life-threatening disease. Among children under 5 have more chance to get infection, illness and death due to severe malaria in high transmission areas of malaria. This study aimed to describe the characteristics and malaria preventive practices among caregivers of under-five children and to find out the associations between them in high-risk areas of Ngapudaw Township, Ayeyarwady Region-Myanmar. A community based cross-sectional study was conducted among 422 caregivers of children under five in April 2018. Data was collected using interviewer-administered questionnaires and entered by double entry. Data analysis was done using excel and SPSS version 22 by Chi-square test and Fisher Exact’s test for bivariate analysis and multiple logistic regression for multivariate analysis. Majority of the respondents had good malaria preventive practices for overall personal protective measures (70.6%), and treatment seeking practice (80.5%). However, most of the respondents had poor malaria preventive practices for environmental control practice (57.4%), maintenance of bed nets or LLINs (over 60%), and use of mosquito repellents (98%) and coils (97%). With personal protective measures, economic status (p value= 0.033), number of household members (p value= 0.005), level of knowledge (p value = 0.011), level of perceived susceptibility (p value = 0.002), level of perceived severity (p value < 0.001) and barriers (p value < 0.001) showed statistically significant association at bivariate level and only number of household members (p value= 0.010) and perceived severity (p value < 0.001) maintained their associations at multivariate analysis. With environmental control measures, level of perceived severity and barriers showed statistically significant associations at 0.05 level in both levels of analysis. With malaria preventive practice regarding treatment seeking practice, economic status (p value= 0.032), level of perceived severity (p value <0.001), perceived benefits (p value <0.001) and perceived self-efficacy (p value = 0.042) revealed statistically significant associations in bivariate analysis and only level of perceived severity (p value <0.001) maintained its significance and levels of perceived barriers (p value= 0.039) become significant. As there were poor preventive practices of environmental control measures, maintaining bednets or LLINs, use of mosquito coils and repellents, poor knowledge of use of mosquito repellent and coil among caregivers of under-five children and perceived severity could statistically significantly influence on all three kinds of malaria preventive practices in our study, community based program like participatory ruaral appraisal (PRA) should be implemented in that region.
