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Context: Rabies, a zoonotic disease caused by Lyssavirus genus rabies virus, is 100% fatal yet preventable. Appropriate and timely management of rabies cases will help in reducing and preventing mortality. Health-care personnel, especially the junior doctors who are at the threshold of their public health service, need to be equipped with adequate knowledge to be able to provide effective care. Aims: The aims of the study are to assess the knowledge about rabies and to assess the association between knowledge with sociodemographic characteristics among the junior doctors of a tertiary care hospital, Imphal. Settings and Design: A cross-sectional study was conducted among 520 junior doctors of a tertiary care hospital including interns, house officers, and postgraduate trainees from June 2018 to July 2019. Subjects and Methods: Data collection was done by questionnaire method. Statistical Analysis Used: The data were analyzed using IBM SPSS for Windows, Version 21.0. Armonk, NY, USA. Results: Only 17.5% of the junior doctors had adequate knowledge about rabies. Those who had come across and those who had treated rabies were 35.4% and 23.7%, respectively. Only around half of the respondents knew the management of the WHO Category I and III animal bite exposure. Conclusions: In the present study, it was seen that the overall knowledge of the junior doctors was poor. Only 2 out of 10 of the participants had adequate knowledge of rabies. One-fourth of the participants had treated rabies in their clinical practice and those who had treated rabies had better knowledge compared to those respondents who had never treated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background & objectives India contributes maximum to world's cervical cancer burden. Prevention through vaccination is one of the pillars of the global strategy adopted by the World Health Organization (WHO) for the elimination of cervical cancer. Uptake of human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, which is about to be introduced in Universal Immunization Programme can be predicted by assessing its acceptance. Methods A quasi-experimental study was conducted among parents of adolescent girls of Bishnupur from February to May 2023 to evaluate the effect of a one-on-one health educational intervention programme on acceptance of the HPV vaccine. Data were collected by face-to-face interviews using a structured questionnaire based on the Health Belief Model from 70 participants selected through convenience sampling. Participants who responded 'definitely yes' to getting their daughters vaccinated with the HPV vaccine were considered as 'vaccine acceptant'. Health education comprised three sessions two wk apart. Descriptive statistics, Cochrane's Q and ANOVA were applied using SPSS 26. Results The median age of the participants was 38 (IQR: 34-44) yr, and 77.1 per cent were females. HPV vaccine acceptance improved significantly over time from 61.4 to 81.4 to 88.6 per cent (P =0.001), respectively. On application of repeated measure ANOVA, perceived benefits of vaccination (P <0.001) and perceived susceptibility to disease (P <0.001) improved significantly across the three time points, whereas perceived severity (P =0.051) and perceived barriers (P =0.367) did not. Interpretation & conclusions Health education intervention was effective at improving vaccine acceptance. Awareness programmes before the rollout of HPV vaccination and continuous re-enforcement would improve parents' perceived benefits and thereby potentially increase vaccine coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]