Awareness: Treatment and Prevention of Anemia among Higher Primary School Girls

Introduction: Among school-aged children, anemia is considerably known to be a global public health problem. Awareness about anemia at this age group enhances children’s learning potential in schools, increases their fitness and work capacity. Objective: To assess the knowledge regarding treatment and prevention of anemia among higher primary school girls between urban and rural schools. Methodology: A descriptive comparative study was conducted among 450 (urban) and 450 (rural) school girls at higher primary schools, Belgaum district, Karnataka. Stratified random sampling technique was used to select the school girl children. A closed ended structured knowledge questionnaire was designed to assess the knowledge. Results: Majority of 410 (91.1%) participants had poor knowledge, 36 (8.0%) had average knowledge and only 4 (0.9%) had good knowledge in urban, whereas in rural higher primary school 348 (77.3%), 100 (22.2%) and 2 (0.4%) had poor, average and good knowledge respectively. The mean knowledge score was 8.46 in urban was higher as compared to mean knowledge score of 6.54 in rural higher primary school girl children. Further, the knowledge score of urban school children was associated with their age, class, mother education and family income (p value <0.05). Moreover, in rural school, there was no significant association was found between knowledge scores and type of diet, mothers’ occupation, religion, type family, number of siblings of participants (p value >0.05). Conclusion: Current study showed majority of school girls had poor knowledge regarding anemia both in urban and rural. Educational intervention with creative innovations for awareness regarding prevention of anemia is required to overcome this issue.