Black fungus or mucormycosis: a cross-sectional knowledge assessment among the Bangladeshi health care workers during COVID-19 pandemic (original) (raw)

PsyRxiv, 2021

Abstract

‘Black fungus’ or ‘Mucormycosis’ is an emerging public health concern during the COVID-19 pandemic. The rise of black fungus cases here in Bangladesh among the COVID-19 infected persons has been raised reasonable alarming conditions among health care workers along with the general people. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate black fungus knowledge of Bangladeshi health care workers aiming the issue could be managed readily by the health care systems. A cross-sectional study was carried out among the Bangladeshi health care workers from May 25, 2021, to June 5, 2021. As COVID-19 restriction existed countrywide, data were collected via a semi-structured online questionnaire by following convenient and snowball sampling methods. The main outcome variable of this study was the black fungus knowledge score; was measured by a six items’ questionnaire. The other studied variables included socio-demographic, workplace, COVID-19, and health-related information of the respondents. The t-test and one-way ANOVA test were performed to investigate the association between the black fungus knowledge score and the studied variables. This study found 422 responses from the health care workers of Bangladesh. Among the respondents, nearly half of them (45.26%) were doctors (n= 191); where the nurses (n=161) were 38.15%, and other health care workers (n=70) were 16.59%. This study found that the black fungus knowledge mean scores of health care workers were significantly associated with seniority (p=0.001), gender (p-value = 0.012), profession (p <0.001), death of friends and family members due to COVID-19 (p=0.049), and, etc. Moreover, the gender, income, job type, and marital status of the respondents were also found to be significantly associated with the mean scores of several items of the black fungus knowledge questionnaire. Proper knowledge of health care workers regarding any emerging public health issues is considered as a sine qua non-indicator of implementing the health care system readily. This study emphasized the black fungus knowledge of the health care workers along with other associated factors. The study's findings could help the policymakers to mitigate the mucormycosis and other infectious diseases emergencies in the post-COVID-19 situation, where the wave of the pandemic was surging continuously.

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