Knowledge, attitude and practice on bats-borne diseases among village residents : a pilot study

Ebola virus disease (EVD), Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (SARS-CoV), rabies and Nipah infections were examples of diseases that were related to bats and shook the world with a series of outbreak and epidemic. Through the understanding of bats as potential public health risk, awareness had become vital to prevent another outbreak. This pilot study was done to evaluate the appropriateness of the questionnaires and to determine preliminary data on knowledge, attitude and practices of bats-related infections. Residents of a village were recruited by randomly choosing houses from a list obtained from the local head village. Knowledge, attitude and practice were assessed using a 56-items questionnaire. The study recruited 100 respondents. The questionnaire’s Cronbach Alpha score was 0.817. Majority of the respondents were found to have good knowledge (71%), attitude (99%) and practice (64%) relating to bat-related infection. There was a weak positive correlation between knowledge and practice towards bat-related infections among residents of the study population. Majority (80%) of respondents did not aware that bats can cause rabies, and 84% did not know about rabies vaccination. The result of this pilot study provides a limited but valuable insight into bat-related infection. Overall, respondents had good knowledge, attitude and practice scores towards bats-related infection. However, more awareness is needed to key areas lacking such as in educating awareness about rabies in bats

Reasons for choosing medicine and career suitability among medical students

Choosing a course to pursue is an important decision for students to make. A suitable career should correspond to the students’ personalitiy for future work satisfaction and success. The objectives of this study were to determine the students’ reasons for choosing medicine, their personality traits and aptitude (suitability). This was a cross-sectional study involving all third-year medical students at Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia. A self-administered questionnaire was used, which included questions on demographic data, Sidek Career Interest Inventory and reasons for choosing medicine. The inventory was used to measure the students’ personality traits and career suitability. A total of 80 students participated in the study. Majority of them were females (n=56, 70.0%). The findings showed that 45.7% (n=44) of the repondents chose medicine because of ‘passion and interest’, while 24.7% (n=20) and 19.8% (n=16) because of ‘parental influence’ and ‘to help the society’, respectively. For medicine, two personality traits are essential which are investigative and social personality traits. Approximately, 47.5% (n=38) of the respondents had high scores in investigative personality trait. However, only 13.8% (n=11) of them had high scores in social personality trait. Only 12.5% (n=10) of the students had high scores when combining both of the traits. Majority of the students chose medicine for altruistic reasons. However, only a few of them had suitable aptitude for this course namely investigative and social skill. Therefore, the students and the teachers need to be aware of these issues and cultivate the required skills in the students for better career outcome

Association between sociodemographic factors, working experience and training status with knowledge level towards food and personal hygiene among food handlers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Food borne illness seems to become more common in Malaysia. Thus, food handlers as the most important person need to play their role in providing safe food for their customers. Hence, nowadays it is compulsory for them to undergo food training course in order to gain knowledge on food and personal hygiene. However, not only training can affect level of knowledge but also working experience and socio-demographic characteristics. The purpose of this study was to determine the association between socio-demographic factors, working experience and training status with knowledge level towards food and personal hygiene among 180 food handlers who attended the vaccination programme in Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur (DBKL) clinic. The data were collected from 180 food handlers through the methods of questionnaire and analysed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 21 for Windows. Based from the total answer answered by total 180 respondents, 96.11% score more than 80% of total questions correct ly, indicating that majority of the food handlers have a good knowledge on food and personal hygiene with frequency of 174. In the demographic profile analysis showed there is no association between socio-demographic factors and knowledge when. While analysis test showed there was significant difference for knowledge based on working experience. The results showed that only working experience is associated with knowledge