What do mothers know about Acute Respiratory Infection: a case from eastern Nepal

Abstract

A descriptive study was conducted in Eastern Nepal with an objective to assess the knowledge of mothers about acute respiratory infection (ARI). Two hundred mothers, who had currently at least a child under five, from randomly selected households were interviewed. 50.5% of the mothers correctly knew the signs and symptoms of ARI without pneumonia; 45% had mixed responses. Only 2.5% of the responding mothers reported to have knowledge about danger signs of ARI, 39.5% had wrong answers and 12% did not know about the danger signs of ARI. Regarding knowledge about home care management, 50.5% had correct responses. Both the correct and wrong responses about knowledge of ARI were more or less equally distributed across the educational level, ethnicity and age group of responding mothers. It is concluded that knowledge of mothers about ARI in general is low, particularly very low on danger signs of ARI. This might have led to delayed specific treatment of children with ARI, which could have resulted in various complications including death.