Assessment of Caregivers/Mothers Knowledge, Attitude and Practices in Prevention and Treatment of Childhood Malaria in Yewa South Local Government Area of Nigeria

Abstract

This study assessed mothers’/caregivers’ knowledge, attitude and practices concerning home treatment  and prevention of malaria in children with a view to ascertaining the determinants of adherence to the current  treatment guidelines on drug therapy and ITN use.The study employed a cross-sectional design. Three hundred and thirty mother-child pairs were recruited for the study through multi-stage sampling method. The results showed that sizeable proportions of the respondents were able to identify the more common symptoms of uncomplicated malaria – headache (67%), body weakness (50.9%), fever (44.2%) and 92.9%  reported mosquito bite as the cause of malaria, while 90.7% considered it as serious illness. One hundred and eighty-five (55%) respondents first treated malaria at home with orthodox medicines, herbs or provided other traditional forms of care. Artemisinin combination therapy was mentioned by only 43.8% of the respondents but the proportion of mothers’/caregivers who administered it to children was 14%. Moreover, 96.3% of mothers/caregivers still gave Chloroquine, when they treated malaria at home. Respondents with higher educational attainments were more likely to use ITN compared with those of lower educational attainments (.2=15.6, p<0.05).Furthermore,  occupation was the only statistically significant predictors of ACT use (OR= 0.824, p<0.05).In conclusion, Kknowledge about the change of recommended drug for the treatment of uncomplicated malaria at home and the use of ITN was still poor, therefore effort must be intensified toward encouraging new recommended drug and ITN use.

Keywords: Malaria,mothers/caregivers, childhood, ACT, ITN.