Assessment of Teachers’ Knowledge about Tuberculosis at Primary School in Balad City
Abstract Tuberculosis (TB) is one of the most common infectious diseases worldwide and continues to be a major public health problem for low and middle-income countries. Undoubtedly, Lack of knowledge about tuberculosis among health care and education workers, as well as if knowledge and practices of tuberculosis among students were generally insufficient causes an increased risk of contracting the disease. Tuberculosis (TB) is a chronic communicable bacterial disease caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis. The Latest World Health Organization (WHO) Report shows that there were 9.0 Million new TB cases and 1.5 Million tuberculosis deaths. The Transmission of the TB disease by Mycobacterium tuberculosis (a bacterium of a group that includes the causative agents of tuberculosis). takes place by air in the form of sneeze, talk, cough, spit, etc. [1,9,11,12,13] This applied study attempt to identify, assess and analyze teachers’ knowledge about tuberculosis in primary schools. A descriptive design, cross-sectional study was carried out in order to achieve the earlier stated objectives of this study by find out the relationship between teachers’ knowledge and social demographic data (sex, age, academic achievement, ….). The present study lasted for four months by prepared a questionnaires to assess the level of teachers’ knowledge, and these questionnaire contains many themes, each theme contained a number of questions to evaluate and analyze teachers’ knowledge of tuberculosis by answering a set of questions (as a variables); (mode of transmission, symptoms and signs, diagnostic features of TB, duration of treatment, prevention methods, risk of developing tuberculosis). The research hypothesis also states that (mycobacterium tuberculosis factor) has a direct impact on TB infection, and to achieve this hypothesis, a questionnaire was distributed to a sample with a size of (58) teachers and the method of Multiple Logistic Regression was used for statistical treatment. Finally, the research concluded a set of results and conclusions included in tables by comparing Likelihood-ratio chi-square statistics and classification table of the observed versus predicted responses.