Educação em saúde para prevenção das Infecções de Transmissão Hídrica e Alimentar causadas por parasitos com ênfase na Saúde Única

Abstract

Food and Water Transmitted Infections (FWTI) affect mainly socioeconomically vulnerable populations in developing countries, with children being the most affected. The FWTI interfere with children's physical and cognitive development and can even lead to their death. Approaches in the context of One Health are important in the management and control of these infections, along with health education, which is one of the main strategies in the fight against these diseases. Those approaches enable changes in habits that are capable of life quality improvement, being the school environment a convenient space for health promotion, prevention, and education. Therefore, the objective of this research was to carry out activities, build didactic material and evaluate its effectiveness in health promotion regarding the FWTI, using the One Health approach in two municipal schools in the city of Recife, Pernambuco. The educational actions were carried out with 8th and 9th grade students and took place in three moments: (1) application of a questionnaire before the educational actions, to verify the knowledge they already had on the subject; (2) educational activities that consisted of video presentation, reading and delivery of cordel literature, bingo game and human board game; (3) application of the same questionnaire after the educational activities were completed to verify the learned knowledge. In total, 86 students participated in the study. In the first assessment, 40.2% said they didn’t know the FWTI; 83.7% reported not being aware of how FWTI are transmitted; 82.6% didn’t know how to prevent FWTI; 100% didn’t know what is One Health and 100% didn’t know the relationship between One Health and FWTI. In the second evaluation, 100% became aware of all the mentioned FWTI; 81.4% and 83.7% said they were aware of how FWTI are transmitted and prevented, respectively; 66.3% came to understand the concept of One Health and 24.4% said they understood the relationship between One Health and the FWTI. Statistical analysisshowed (p ≤ 0.05) that the educational actions and the used materials contributed to the students' learning on the topic addressed, demonstrating that an actively methodology is quite effective for the apprehension and fixation of information. The results also show the importance of One Health theme’s implementation in school curriculum, since the earlier society learns about its place in the environment, the higher awareness of their impact about it.