Knowledge, Attitude and Practice of Malaria Control among FUTO Students

This study to determine the knowledge, attitude and practice of malaria control among students of Federal University of Technology of Owerri living in and outside the campus, was carried out between July and September 2018. A total of 160 students were randomly sampled with the use of structured questionnaires as well as giemsa stained thin and thick films to determine the prevalence of malaria. Among this number, 25% (40/160) of the students were infected with Plasmodium falciparium. The highest prevalence of 52% (13/25) was recorded among students living in the school hostel. Based on the questionnaire analysis, 96.25% of the students indicated mosquito bite as the cause of malaria, while 3.13% of them said malaria is caused by too much consumption of oil. There is a great disparity on the knowledge of the method of diagnosis with a total of 29.38% of the students preferring self-diagnosis, 17.5% stated microscopy, 11.88% RDT, while a greater percentage of them 41.25% do not have idea about any method of diagnosis. For control measures, 46.9% of the students do not practice any control measure against malaria. A whopping 56.9% of the students' population takes antimalarial only when they are diagnosed. Some of the students do not fancy the relevance of going for laboratory diagnosis. Based on that, a total of 29.38% of the students rated that it is “barely important” going to laboratory, while 10.63% rated “not important”, although a good number (60%) believes on the importance of going for laboratory diagnosis by rating “very importance”. However, there seems to be a high level of knowledge about the cause of malaria among the students but the attendant knowledge of diagnosis and practice of control measures are lacking, as a result, this could impact negatively on the health of the students. Greater awareness is needed in order to improve knowledge on the importance of laboratory diagnosis and malaria control which can take care of their attitudes towards malaria. Attitude basically is always influenced by beliefs and existing bodies of knowledge.