Rehman Inayat Shukr, Salman Ali, Tahira Khanum, Tahir Mehmood.
Is there a link between maternal illiteracy and childhood diarrhea?.
Rawal Med J Jan ;34(2):199-202.

Objective: To assess the association between maternal illiteracy and frequency of childhood diarrhea. Subjects and Methods This cross sectional study was carried out at Department of Pediatric of Combined Military Hospital Multan from September 1, 2008 to May 1, 2009. A total of 200 mothers were interviewed regarding frequency of diarrhea in their child between 1-2 years of age over past one year. One hundred children belonged to breastfed group and 100 to bottle fed group. All mothers lived in houses with piped water supply, filtered drinking water in immediate neighborhood and latrines inside the house. Husbands educational status varied between matriculate to intermediate and earning between Pak Rs 7000-9000/month. Dependent variable diarrhea was analyzed for both groups of children after stratifying mothers education into 4 categories nil to class 3, class 4 to 9, matric and intermediate to graduate. Frequency of diarrhea was recoded for last one year and diarrhea morbidity was calculated on a scale of three. Results: For breast fed group the frequency of diarrhea annually varied from 0.41 for highly educated mothers (intermediate to graduate) to 2.182 for uneducated mothers (p=0.001). For morbidity, the difference was even more striking and varied from 0.42 to 4.04 (p=0.001). The difference between diarrhea frequency and morbidity was also striking for the bottle-fed group, being 0.78 to 2.54 for annual frequency and 1 to 3.69 for morbidity for high to no education respectively. Conclusion: Frequency and morbidity of diarrhea was more in less educated mothers. This suggests that one of the interventions aiming to reduce diarrhea should be to improve maternal education status.

PakMediNet -Pakistan's largest Database of Pakistani Medical Journals - http://www.pakmedinet.com