Background

         “Water is life and clean water means health”        

                                                                                 –Audrey Hepburn

            At the eve of the millennium, despite all the progress reported worldwide in the recent   decades more than 2,3 billion  people   still live without access to sanitation facilities  and are unable to practice such basic hygiene as washing their hands with soap and water .Disease related to poor sanitation and water availability cause many people to fall ill or even die ,children are the most vulnerable to health hazards and consequently are affected the most.While the impact of poor sanitation and hygiene is known to be disastrous for small children , it has also has an important impact on the health of school age children including adolescents .It is obvious that lack of sanitation and hygiene is a public disaster that disaster that deserves the highest priority .When children survive  beyond their fifth birthday , they still face major  problems of ill health and malnutrition .

Objectives

• To assess the knowledge on prevention of water borne disease  among the mothers  in a selected  urban area of pune.
• To assess the  practice on prevention of water borne disease among mothers of underfive children in urban area of pune.
• To compare the knowledge and practice  regarding prevention of water borne disease among mothers of  selected  urban area of pune.

Aim

            To  assess the level of knowledge and practices of mothers regarding domestic methods of water sanitation and to educate on domestic water sanitation methods based on their findings

Methods:

            A cross sectional survey was conducted over a period of six weeks among 300 housewifes  in a selected urban community. A systematic random sampling was done selecting the K th house and every Kth house was selected for the study and mothers were interviewed through a semi structured questionnaire. The questionnaire consisted of source, collection, storage, purification , consumption, merits of portable drinking water and demerits of unsafe drinking water.

Results

            Out of 150 respondents 97 (65%) had good knowledge and 40 (26.67%) had average knowledge and 13 (8.33%) had poor knowledge whereas the water sanitation practices of the mothers were very poor  even though they had knowledge about the water sanitation.68% of the respondent were having poor practices and 24%had average and 8% had very poor practices .

Conclusion

            The study revealed the gap in the knowledge and practice of the mothers regarding water sanitation which is a very important daily routine of every human being .it demand a concerted effort from the community health nursing team to bridge these gap between knowledge and practice which will bring a positive behavioral and knowledge change