Assessment Scientific Knowledge of Medical Interns about Four Common Infection Diseases in Fars

ABSTRACT The present study was designed to assess the knowledge of medical interns about four common infectious diseases; tuberculosis, brucellosis, typhoid fever and dysentery. This cross sectional study was done in Shiraz in 1999 and 2000. 211 interns properly filled our questionnaire which was prepared about tuberculosis. brucellosis, typhoid fever and bloody diarrhea for evaluation of their knowledge about the mentioned infectious diseases. Then we analyzed the results with considering of some variables like sex of the respondent, the year of graduation and their medical schools (Shiraz, Fassa and Jahrom). The knowledge of interns about tuberculosis, typhoid fever and bloody diarrhea was not related with sex, the year of graduation or their medical schools. Only about brucellosis males responded better than females (p<0.02). But it wasn't related with other variables. Most of the interns had unfavorable level of knowledge about tuberculosis, brucellosis and typhoid fever and about half of them had unfavorable level of knowledge about bloody diarrhea. In comparison of knowledge of the respondents about each of the four diseases it was revealed that mean scores were 4.18 in tuberculosis. 2.14 in brucellosis, 3.21 in typhoid fever and 7.04 in bloody diarrhea, So their knowledge about these infections in decreasing order was about bloody diarrhea, tuberculosis, typhoid fever and brucellosis (p<0.0001). This order also was similar to the mean number of patients which were seen by interns in their clinical rotations [bloody diarrhea (16.04), tuberculosis (3.00) typhoid fever (1.36) and brucellosis (1.02)1 (p<0.0001). The result of this study indicated that there is a deficiency in teaching the common infectious diseases to medical interns and there is a need for revising the education program for training interns about these common and other outpatient diseases.