Knowledge, Attitude and Practice Regarding Swine Flu (H1N1) among People Accompanying Patients of a Tertiary Health Care Centre, Bhuj

摘要

"Background: Knowledge of causa-tive agent, symptoms, mode of transmission and its prevention of Influenza A is necessary to know for individual protection as well as to control the spread of the disease in community. Objective: To study the awareness, attitude and practices regarding H1N1 Influenza A among the peo-ple accompanying patients of GKGH, Bhuj. Material and Methods: Cross-sectional study was conducted among people accompanying the patients of GKGH after the epidemic situation. Informed verbal consent was taken from all the participants and they were interviewed person-ally through pre-designed and pre-tested questionnaire to elicit infor-mation regarding awareness of In-fluenza A (H1N1). Data such col-lected was analyzed using Micro-soft Excel 2007 Results: Of the 227 people included in the study, 105 (46.26%) knew that it was a viral disease. Of all the par-ticipants, 123 (54.19%) knew about the mode of transmission. Around three fourth (74.01%) participants told cough & cold as a major symp-toms and 71.81% told fever as a ma-jor symptom. Less commonly oc-curring symptoms such as vomiting (7.93%) and diarrhoea (2.64%) were known to few participants. Conclusion: Knowledge regarding Influenza A (H1N1) needs to be en-hanced among people through ap-propriate awareness programs to prevent spread of disease on large scale.