Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Association of American Geographers最新文献

Background: Antimicrobial medications are becoming ineffective because of the surge in antimicrobial resistance. Poor knowledge and inappropriate beliefs combined with the misuse of antibiotics may be common in the community and public health institutions. This study assessed the knowledge, belief, and antibiotic use practice among patients visiting rural hospitals in Northwest Ethiopia.

Methods: A facility-based multicenter cross-sectional survey was conducted in Northwest Ethiopian primary hospitals from August to September 2020. The data are presented as frequencies and means (±SD) of our findings. The independent samples T test and One-Way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) were used to explore the mean knowledge differences of antibiotic use among respondents. A pvalue of <0.05 with 95% CI was considered significant.

Results: More than half of the participants (57.2%) were males, and the mean age was 34.8 ± 13.4 years. The mean (±SD) knowledge score of the respondents was 3.69 (±1.7) (range: 0 to 10), and the majority (69.7%) had poor knowledge. The mean (±SD) belief score (acceptance towards antibiotic use) of the respondents was 20.08 ± 4 (range: 7 to 35) and most (70.1%) of the respondents had moderate levels of perception regarding antibiotic use. The majority (69.5%) of respondents took antibiotics over the past year. Participants practiced inappropriate uses of antibiotics such as medication discontinuation (49.5%), keeping unused antibiotics for future use (35.5%), and sharing medications with/from others (30.1%). Diploma holder participants had significantly higher mean knowledge scores on antibiotic use than those who were unable to read and write (p=0.047). Similarly, students had higher mean knowledge scores compared with farmers (p=0.024), merchants (p=0.031), and housewives (p=0.047).

Conclusion: Our study showed a widespread misuse of antibiotics in Northwest Ethiopia. Malpractice such as dose interrupting, sharing of antibiotics for/from the others, and keeping leftover drugs for future use were common among the respondents. These findings suggest that a greater effort is required in public education related to proper and safe uses of antibiotics and that greater efforts are needed to enforce the control of antibiotic use to overcome the emergence of antibiotic resistance.

Each decade since the 1950s, demographers have generated high quality net migration estimates by age, sex, and race for US counties using decennial census data as starting and ending populations. The estimates have been downloaded tens of thousands of times and widely used for planning, diverse applications, and research. Census 2020 should allow the series to extend through the 2010-2020 decade. The accuracy of new estimates, however, could be challenged by differentially private (DP) disclosure avoidance techniques in Census 2020 data products. This research brief estimates the impact of DP implementation on the accuracy of county-level net migration estimates. Using differentially private Census 2010 demonstration data, we construct a hypothetical set of DP migration estimates for 2000-2010 and compare them to published estimates, using common accuracy metrics and spatial analysis. Findings show that based on demonstration data released in 2020, net migration estimates by five-year age groups would only be accurate enough for use in about half of counties. Inaccuracies are larger in counties with populations less than 50,000, among age groups 65 and over, and among Hispanics. These problems are not fully resolved by grouping into broader age groups. Moreover, errors tend to cluster spatially in some regions of the country. Ultimately, the ability to generate accurate net migration estimates at the same level of detail as in the past will depend on the Census Bureau's allocation of the privacy loss budget.