A Study on Knowledge, Attitude towards Pulmonary Tuberculosis and Health Seeking Behavior for Pulmonary Tuberculosis Symptoms among Urban Slum Dwellers of Chennai.

INTRODUCTION : India is the highest tuberculosis (TB) burden country1 accounting for one fifth of the global incidence (Global annual incidence estimate is 9.4 million cases out of which it is estimated that 1.98 million cases are from India). India is 17th among 22 High Burden Countries in terms of TB incidence rate. It has been acknowledged though that TB control efforts worldwide, although impressive, are not sufficient. The global TB targets – detecting 70% of TB cases and successfully treating 85% of them, and halving the prevalence and mortality of the disease by 2015 as part of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – are likely to be met only if current efforts are intensified. Revised national tuberculosis control programme (RNTCP) has consistently maintained the treatment success rate >85% and case detection rate (CDR) close to the global target of 70%. To maintain these goals requires active community participation by way of creating awareness on the etiology, symptomatology, management, preventive measures, and information of availability of services, etc, for TB. The national Annual Risk Of Tuberculosis Infection (ARTI) was estimated at 1.5% i.e. 75 new smear positive pulmonary TB cases are expected per 100,000 population annually. TB primarily affects people in their most productive years with important socio-economic consequences for the household when an individual falls sick with TB. Poor living conditions, debility and malnutrition predisposes population to disease. Urban slum-dwellers require intensive focus and support from the tuberculosis programme, as these populations often are not able to access timely diagnosis or complete the full duration of anti TB treatment, and hence are at risk of unfavorable treatment outcomes including deaths, defaults, failures and drug resistance. OBJECTIVES : 1. To assess knowledge and attitude towards pulmonary tuberculosis among urban slum dwellers of Chennai. 2. To study health seeking behavior for pulmonary tuberculosis symptoms in the above population. 3. To find out the association between knowledge, attitude and health seeking behavior with selected demographic variables like age, sex and educational status. CONCLUSIONS : The study concludes that females, older population and individuals without schooling or with primary schooling were observed to be the groups with a significantly lower level of knowledge about symptoms, transmission, diagnosis, treatment and prevention of TB. Poor knowledge was also observed in smokers and alcoholics. Overall TB knowledge and attitude towards TB was higher among males, younger age and higher schooling respondents. Concerted efforts should be taken to create awareness / knowledge about TB and also to change their negative attitude towards TB