Evaluation of an educational intervention for farming families to protect their children from pesticide exposure.

A culturally appropriate educational intervention was developed and directed towards farming families in Menoufia governorate, Egypt, to improve their knowledge and practices in protecting their children from exposure to pesticides. Parents were randomly assigned to either a lecture or videotape training group. Ability to recall information or improve practices among parents was evaluated in 3 sessions: pretraining and 2 weeks and 1 month after training. Knowledge and practice scores after training of younger and more educated participants were significantly higher than older, less educated participants. Knowledge and practice performance of the videotape group was better than the lecture group and in both groups the improvement of knowledge scores after training was significantly higher than that of practice scores.