The impact of antimicrobial resistance awareness interventions involving schoolchildren, development of an animation and parents engagements: a pilot study.

BACKGROUND: Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a global health challenge, particularly in low- and middle-income countries where antibiotics are widely available to consumers, leading to their misuse. However, AMR educational interventions for engaging parents of schoolchildren are mainly lacking in Sub-Saharan Africa. This study aimed to assess the potential of AMR animation and schoolchildren in influencing parents' AMR knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs. METHODS: Parents of schoolchildren aged 11-15 years in Tema, a city in Ghana, watched and discussed an AMR animation designed with ideas from the schoolchildren's top stories and picture drawings. The children from two schools were first engaged with AMR lessons, with one school using storytelling, the other school using picture drawing, and none serving as a control. The children were then asked to discuss the lessons with their parents. Baseline surveys of parents of randomly selected children were conducted to assess AMR knowledge, attitudes and beliefs before engaging the students and parents, and immediately after the parents participated in viewing and discussing the animation. McNemar and t-tests were used to assess changes in AMR knowledge, attitudes and beliefs. RESULTS: Parents who participated in the animation event, and whose schoolchildren were in the storytelling intervention school had significantly improved knowledge regarding the statement "Antibiotics will cure any infection" (p = 0.021, χ2 = 0.711; 88% vs 50%) between baseline and endline. However, these parents also had statistically significant decreased scores regarding the statement "Antibiotics do not kill our good bacteria" (p = 0.021, χ2 = 1.042; 71.4% vs 40%) between baseline and endline. There was no significant effect on any statement among parents whose children were in the picture drawing school. However, t-test results combining the statements as composite scores showed statistically significant difference in only the attitude construct among parents whose children participated in storytelling intervention (p = 0.043) or picture drawing intervention (p = 0.019). There were no statistically significant changes in knowledge and beliefs constructs. CONCLUSIONS: This study shows that interventions involving schoolchildren with parents engagements and AMR animation could influence parents' AMR attitudes. The intervention could also positively or negatively impact parents' AMR knowledge. Modifications of the interventions may be needed for tackling AMR.

Children against antibiotics misuse and antimicrobial resistance: assessing effectiveness of storytelling and picture drawing as public engagement approaches.

Background: Interventions delivered in schools have been found to be effective in improving knowledge of antibiotics and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) among school-aged children, particularly those in high-income countries, but the evidence is largely lacking in low- and middle-income countries. This study aimed to design, implement and assess storytelling and picture drawing as engagement approaches for improving knowledge, attitudes and beliefs about antibiotics and AMR among schoolchildren in Ghana. Methods: Two schools with a total population of 375 schoolchildren ages 11-15 years in Tema, a city in Ghana, participated in public engagement interventions involving storytelling in one school and picture drawing in another school. The interventions included eight weeks of engagement led by science teachers and a competition held in each school. For quantitative outcome-based evaluation, some schoolchildren were randomly sampled in each school. Purposive sampling was also used to select some schoolchildren in each school for qualitative outcome-based evaluation. Respondents completed identical knowledge, attitudes and beliefs questionnaires and were interviewed at two time points (before and at most a week) after key interventions to assess changes in antibiotics and AMR knowledge, attitudes and beliefs. Results: Picture drawing had more significant effects (both positive and negative) on schoolchildren's AMR knowledge, attitudes and beliefs, whereas storytelling had a negative effect on children's AMR knowledge and no significant impact on beliefs and attitudes. Conclusions: Our project's findings suggest that public engagement interventions that use picture drawing and storytelling may influence the knowledge, attitudes and beliefs of schoolchildren regarding antibiotic misuse and AMR. However, modifications are required to make them more effective. These include making the storytelling effective by turning it into drama or plays.

Computer-Aided Diagnostics of Heart Disease Risk Prediction Using Boosting Support Vector Machine.

Heart diseases are a leading cause of death worldwide, and they have sparked a lot of interest in the scientific community. Because of the high number of impulsive deaths associated with it, early detection is critical. This study proposes a boosting Support Vector Machine (SVM) technique as the backbone of computer-aided diagnostic tools for more accurately forecasting heart disease risk levels. The datasets which contain 13 attributes such as gender, age, blood pressure, and chest pain are taken from the Cleveland clinic. In total, there were 303 records with 6 tuples having missing values. To clean the data, we deleted the 6 missing records through the listwise technique. The size of data, and the fact that it is a purely random subset, made this approach have no significant effect for the experiment because there were no biases. Salient features are selected using the boosting technique to speed up and improve accuracies. Using the train/test split approach, the data is then partitioned into training and testing. SVM is then used to train and test the data. The C parameter is set at 0.05 and the linear kernel function is used. Logistic regression, Nave Bayes, decision trees, Multilayer Perceptron, and random forest were used to compare the results. The proposed boosting SVM performed exceptionally well, making it a better tool than the existing techniques.