“what do you know？”——knowledge among village doctors of lead poisoning in children in rural china -凯发官网入口

research article open access“what do you know?”——knowledgeamong village doctors of lead poisoning inchildren in rural chinaruixue huang 1 , huacheng ning 1 , carl r. baum 2 , lei chen 3* and allen hsiao 3*abstractbackground: this study evaluates the extent of village doctors’ knowledge of lead poisoning in children in ruralchina and assesses the characteristics associated with possessing accurate knowledge.methods: a cross-sectional, questionnaire-based survey of 297 village doctors in fenghuang county, hunan province,china was conducted. all village doctors were interviewed face-to-face using a “what do you know” test questionnairefocusing on prevention strategies and lead sources in rural children.results: a total of 287 (96.6%) village doctors completed the survey in full. most village doctors had an appropriatedegree of general knowledge of lead poisoning; however, they had relatively poor knowledge of lead sources andprevention measures. village doctors with an undergraduate level education scored an average of 2.7 points higherthan those who had a junior college level education (p=0.033). village doctors with an annual income ≤10,000 rmbyuan scored 1.03 points lower than those whose income was >10,001 rmb yuan. ethnic han village doctors scored 1.12 points higher, on average, than ethnic tujia village doctors (p=0.027).conclusions: this study identified important gaps in knowledge concerning lead poisoning in children among a ruralpopulation of village doctors. there is a clear need for multifaceted interventions that target village doctors to improvetheir knowledge regarding lead poisoning in children. the “what do you know” questionnaire is a new tool to evaluatelead poisoning knowledge and education projects.keywords: children, china, lead poisoning, village doctorsbackgroundlead is a heavy metal that is widely distributed throμgh-out the environment [1]. children are particularly vul-nerable to lead poisoning because their bodies are in anongoing state of growth and development [2–5]. mostexperts believe that there is no safe blood lead level(bll) in children [6]. even very low levels of lead exposurecan affect nearly every system in children’s bodies [7, 8].millions of children are exposed to lead with a significantrisk of damage to the brain and nervous system, resultingin impaired growth and learning/behavior problems in-cluding diminished iq, hearing and speech problems, andcriminal behavior [9, 10]. lead is a heavy metal that iswidely distributed throughout the environment. childrenare particularly vulnerable to lead poisoning because theirbodies are in an ongoing state of growth and development.currently, millions of children globally are exposed tolead with a significant risk of damage to the brain and ner-vous system, resulting in impaired growth and learning/behavior problems including diminished iq, hearing andspeech problems, and criminal behavior. in usa, in1970s, preschool children were screened by the centersfor disease control and prevention(cdc) to show thatthe median blood lead level was 15μg/dl and approxi-mately 90% of them with the level beyond 10μg/dl. basedon this data, government of usa took scaled actions todecrease the level and in 2002, the level had dramaticallydeclined to 1.9μg/dl[11]. based on this, some experts rec-ommend that the screening level should be changed to aslow as 2μg/dl, however, cdc didn’t intent to take this* correspondence: lei.chen@yale.edu; allen.hsiao@yale.edu3 section of emergency medicine, department of pediatrics faculty, globalhealth initiative, yale university school of medicine, new haven, usafull list of author information is available at the end of the article© the author(s). 2017 open access this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, andreproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link tothe creative commons license, and indicate if changes were made. the creative commons public domain dedication waiver(http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.huang et al. bmc public health (2017) 17:895 doi 10.1186/s12889-017-4895-2