Students' Awareness about Hepatitis B and its Vaccine

Abstract

Abstract Introduction and objective Health care workers (HCW) and medical students are populations at risk of infection with hepatitis B virus (HBV), especially in endemic countries Effective vaccines have been available for more than 10 years, but many health care workers and medical students are unaware risk of infection and are still not immunized against hepatitis B. Because of the lack of studies dealing with this issue in the country, we, the work team, studied the knowledge and awareness of the students of the Syrian Private University about hepatitis B among the students of the Syrian Private University. Materials and methods The samples were collected at the Syrian Private University through an electronic questionnaire distributed to the special groups of the Syrian Private University. The samples were analyzed by the SPSS program during official working hours. The method for selecting samples is convenience sampling. Our required sample size was 201. It met the criteria for inclusion and exclusion and the design of a cross-sectional study. Results The study included (201) students (66.7% males, 33.3% females), the average age was (23) years, and the ages ranged between (18 and 35 years), and the percentage of medical students was (25.9%), and the rest of the percentages were distributed among the rest of the colleges, percentage Knowledge of viral hepatitis B among students (78.1%), and most of the students were receiving information from communication sites and university lectures (32.8% and 30.3%, respectively). Conclusion This study showed that the first-year students of the Faculty of Medicine have poor knowledge and lack of awareness about hepatitis B, its transmission methods, risk factors, prevention and treatment methods compared to students of older years, and the greater percentage of knowledge was among fourth-year students.