.1 Introduction
During course of literature review, many books, articles, professional and non-professional journals and different web sites were searched for relevant information.
The review of the literatures is focused on the following areas:
2.1. General information on ARI
2.2. National situation of ARI and health seeking behaviour.
2.3. Global situation of ARI and health seeking behaviour.
2.1. General information on ARI
Acute respiratory infection is an acute infection of any part of the respiratory tract and related structures including paranasal sinuses, middle ear and pleural cavity. It may cause inflammation of respiratory tract anywhere from nose to alveoli with the wide range of combination of sign and symptoms. It includes all
Two hundred mothers, who had currently at least a child under five, from randomly selected households were interviewed. 50.5% of the mothers correctly knew the signs and symptoms of ARI without pneumonia; 45% had mixed responses. Only 2.5% of the responding mothers reported to have knowledge about danger signs of ARI, 39.5% had wrong answers and 12% did not know about the danger signs of ARI. Regarding knowledge about home care management, 50.5% had correct responses. Both the correct and wrong responses about knowledge of ARI were more or less equally distributed across the educational level, ethnicity and age group of responding mothers. It is concluded that knowledge of mothers about ARI in general is low, particularly very low on danger signs of ARI. This might have led to delayed specific treatment of children with ARI, which could have resulted in various complications including death (Onta. and Yengden
Mothers or carers were about twice as likely to seek care for a child below 12 months as for a child between 49 and 59 months. There was no statistically significant difference in seeking outside health care between boys and girls and by mother’s age. Larger households and those where the child had many siblings were less likely to provide outside care to ill children than the smaller households. Households with six or more members were about 1.5 times less likely to seek medical care outside the home, compared to those with three or fewer members. An ill child with no or one sibling was about 2.5 times more likely to receive care outside the home, compared to those with three or more siblings. The effect of household size may be a reflection of the availability of resources, with smaller ones likely to have more resources per person than larger ones. A mother with secondary-level education was 1.7 times more likely to seek health care for the child than a mother with no education at all, while a mother with primary-level education was about twice as likely to seek care at a health facility than a mother with no education at all. A working mother was about 1.5 times more likely to seek health care at a health facility than non-working mothers. A child whose father was alive was about 1.5 times more likely to receive outside care than one without a living father. Wealth status had a