Disease Awareness and Prevention

Abstract

For the rural communities in developing countries, health care and sanitation are always one of the major public health challenges. Due to limited resources communities affected by infectious diseases tend to care for the sick at home, with limited knowledge on the diseases. Despite the low literacy rates among the poor populations, the communities are able to understand what goes on around them. It is therefore the duty of public health personnel to disseminate the basic information on disease awareness, prevention and control to the wider population. The public health officials should also be able to gather general knowledge on the health risks and needs of communities by observing the communities’ day-to-day activities. For effective management of infectious diseases, especially for new EIDs and outbreak-prone diseases, training of essential personnel could ensure smooth running of response efforts. Alerting communities about the infectious disease risks that come with their livelihood is of utmost importance if infectious diseases have to be reduced, prevented and controlled in poor rural communities of developing countries.

The original version of this chapter was revised: One of the citations was corrected. The erratum to this chapter is available at DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-0428-5_11

An erratum to this chapter can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-0428-5_11