LIMITING THE COMMUNITY TRANSMISSION OF COMMUNICABLE DISEASE OUTBREAKS THROUGH LOCAL-EVIDENCE-BASED AWARENESS CREATION

Awareness creation (AC) is an effective strategy for curbing the prevalence of communicable diseases (CD) as the knowledge level and prevailing attitude (IFC) of residents towards an outbreak, epidemic or a pandemic are cogent to its prevalence in any community. While authorities in many countries in Africa invested much in creating proper awareness about CDs/pandemics such as COVID-19, the use of mainly foreign visuals greatly limited their viable effectiveness. Adopting a mixed method of investigation, with the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study, this study examined the difference in the effectiveness of local and foreign visual evidences of confirmed infection cases. In the absence of local visual evidences, foreign visual evidences were localized as an alternative. Materials: a total of 10 images and two animated clips were adopted for the study. Subjects: a sample size of 312 was adopted. Following one hypothesis test conducted using Chi-Square, X2 (1, N = 312) = 53.1711, p < .00001, the study revealed that local visual-evidence-based AC contents were more locally effective than foreign visual-evidence-based AC contents. The study therefore concluded that with the adoption of more local or localized visual evidences, the likelihood of health, environmental or social related behavioural adjustments were greater. Therefore, this study recommended that nations, especially African communities, should adopt more of their own locally available evidences of CDs in AC as an effective way to curb their community level prevalence.