November 2020 Vol. 8 No.11

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Original Research Article

Knowledge of School Teachers about Infectious Diseases and the Nutritional Status of Children in Schools of Abbottabad

Fazal Mabood, Muhammad Siqaf Anjum, Abdul Haseeb, Muhammad Shoaib, Aiman Usman Lodhi, Faiqa Ghani

Department of Community Medicine Ayub Medical College Abbottabad

^*Corresponding Author's Email: drabdul.haq15@gmail.com

Received: 01 November 2020  I  Accepted: 21 November 2020  I  Published: 28 November 2020  I  Article ID: MRJMMS-20-187
Copyright © 2020 Author(s) retain the copyright of this article.
This article is published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0.

Abstract

Teachers play an essential role in giving health education to school children about proper nutrition. If their food lacks the required number of calories, it will lead to malnutrition. Same goes for educating students about infectious diseases at school. A teacher who knows the signs of malnutrition can take care of his/her students effectively. He/she would notice the signs of deficiency of any micro or macro-nutrient much before it triggers deleterious effects to the child’s health. It may also affect other children, teachers and parents by spreading and can affect their working ability. We can control the spread of many infectious diseases by giving proper knowledge and training to teachers. A knowledgeable teacher would be able to identify a disease in any of his students in the very early period of infection. He If there is a contagious disease, the teacher’s role will be of immense importance in saving other children from catching that disease. This study was conducted with objectives to assess the knowledge of school teachers about nutrition and infectious diseases, and to compare the knowledge among government and private school teachers. This curriculum based cross sectional descriptive study was designed and selected as convenient sampling technique to be carried out at different schools of district Abbottabad. Data was collected by means of an interview-based questionnaire, which was then computed into statistics using SPSS software and the results were interpreted. The overall knowledge of school teachers was not as good as it should be. A large proportion of teachers had never attended any health program, but majority of them expressed desire to attend such programs if they got an opportunity. The knowledge of government teachers was better than those of private sector schools. Majority of the teachers were aware of the importance of nutrition and infectious diseases knowledge. They wanted that knowledge about child health should be added to the curriculum at the school level. Our study concluded that the knowledge of school teachers needs to be improved a lot. For this purpose, health programs and seminars should be conducted in schools or may be short courses to improve the level of knowledge.

Keywords: Abbottabad, Child health, Infectious diseases Malnutrition, Nutrition, Teachers