ATTITUDE AND PREVENTIVE BEHAVIOR OF DENGUE HEMORRHAGIC FEVER AMONG ELEMENTARY SCHOOL STUDENTS IN JAKARTA, INDONESIABAEQUNI, NARILA MUTIA NASIR1 AND CHRIS ADHIYANTOAbstract Indonesia is an endemic area of Dengue Hemorrhagic Fever (DHF). The disease has spread to all provinces in Indonesia and Jakarta is one of the provinces that has high number of DHF cases. One of the vulnerable group to suffer from the disease is school children. Instead of the treatment, it needs preventive action such as providing health education message to the children. Thus, the objective of this study was to assess the attitude and preventive behavior of DHF among elementary school students in Jakarta Indonesia. This study was carried out using a quasi-experimental study. The 5th and 6th grade students of 21 elementary schools in Jakarta were selected as the study participants. Among twenty-one elementary schools, seven school received poster intervention and other seven school with flipchart intervention. Meanwhile seven schools were determined as the control. There were 632 students involved in the study, which were 211 included in each intervention groups and 210 as the control group. The results showed that attitude of the students toward the prevention of DHF was good even before the intervention. The students strongly agree that cleaning mosquito nests is a pleasant thing. For the preventive behavior, students who received poster intervention (95% confidence interval: 1.189 â 2.866) more active in cleaning their school to combat mosquito nests than those who got flipchart intervention (95% confidence interval: 1.327-3.177) compared to the control group. Providing health education such as poster and flipchart to the elementary school students were effective in triggering the behavior of combating and preventing DHF. |