Indoor Residual Spraying (IRS) discourse for malaria control program in Tanzania: A case of Tarime District

The thrust of this study emanated from the desire to fight against malaria which is among the major leading killer diseases in the country. Hence, mainly the study intended to understand on how past experience on promoting the use of ITNs (Insect Treat Nets) has influenced the Indoor Residual Spraying (IRS) in areas where IRS has been introduced. This study was conducted in Turwa Ward, Tarime District. The study used a non-experimental design in which cross-sectional method was employed. Primary data were collected through In-depth Interviews, Focus Group Discussions (FGD) using semi-structured questionnaires and checklist respectively. Secondary data were collected by reviewing a series of documents related to health promotion, health records and malaria control strategies from the village, ward and district levels, government and non- governmental organization and internet materials. Basically socio-economic factors (education and incomes) and demographic (age, sex, marital status) were cross tabulated and tested for their significances against the IRS implementation status of an individual (1= accepted IRS, 0=otherwise). Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) version 11 was used to process the data. Findings showed that education and marital status of respondents have an influence on compliance to the implementation of IRS. A minimum of primary education is enough to comprehend health promotion messages related to IRS for effective malaria control whereas income was observed not to play a huge role to affect the implementation of IRS because IRS was provided for free. On the other hand, married people were found to comply with the implementation of IRS compared to other categories of marital status The study recommends that; health personnel and civil society organizations should be directly involved in promoting IRS at community levels so as to give clarification on challenging issues, evaluation on health promotion strategies to be or carried out should be done regularly before actual IRS