An Analysis of the Ttitude of People towards Prevention and Control of Dengue in District Bhakkar Punjab Pakistan

Abstract

Dengue fever took hundreds of precious lives in the last two years in Pakistan in general and Punjab province in particular, which is caused by infection from a virus namely Flavi virus and this disease is transmitted by the mosquito Aedes aegypti, rarely the Aedes albopictus. This study was conducted to analyze the attitude of people towards prevention and control of Dengue in District Bhakkar of Punjab Province of Pakistan. The study has found that poor awareness of the people and ignorance is the major reason besides government failure to educate people and to take preventive measures ahead of the breeding of mosquito Aedes aegypti, the Aedes albopictus especially after rainy season during summer. A structured questionnaire was used to collect primary data, which was feeded to SPSS 16 for data analysis. Cronbach’s alpha was calculated for reliability analysis. Descriptive and inferential analyses were done to find the fact. ?² test was used to test the hypotheses on ordinal scale for environmental, personal and chemical control as major variables of the study. There was no difference of attitude between literate and illiterate people towards environmental control. The study further identified that literate were more aware about the environmental and personal control then the illiterate, but both having no information regarding chemical control, however, people living in cities were more aware about the environmental and personal control yet, they know how to use chemicals for control of Dengue. The study concludes that government must take measures ahead of dengue season by educating the people through intensive awareness campaign to control environmental contamination besides use of chemicals to prevent the breeding of dengue as an epidemic to save the precious lives.

Keywords: Dengue Fever, Environmental Control, Personal Control, and Chemical Control.