Assessment of community knowledge about Tuberculosis and its treatment in rural areas of Shashemane, Southern Ethiopia

Abstract

Tuberculosis (TB) is a chronic infectious disease caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Poverty, malnutrition and crowded living conditions have been recognized for decades to increase the risk of developing TB. In addition, lack of knowledge about TB could affect the health-seeking behavior of patients and sustain the transmission of the disease within the community. A community based cross-sectional study was conducted in 4 randomly selected rural kebeles around Shashemene area to assess the community's knowledge about TB between March and May, 2011. A total of 422 voluntary residents were included. The study participants were interviewed about the cause, symptoms, mode of transmissions, treatment and preventive methods of tuberculosis. Despite the fact that higher proportion of the study participants 243 (58.8%, 95% CI, 51.6 to 63.1%) had good level of knowledge about TB almost all (90.2%) of them did not know the causative agent of TB. Farmer participants (OR=2.18; 95% CI: 1.07 to 4.42) had low level of overall knowledge on TB. Almost all (98.98%) of the participants mentioned that TB is a treatable disease. The majority (96.44%) of the participants knew that TB can be transmitted from a patient to another person. The results of this study revealed that the community members in the present study area had little knowledge of the causative agent of TB and hence implementation of appropriate community-based health education is important to raise community's knowledge about TB.