Background: Blood can save millions of life. Blood transfusion is one of the most crucial interventions in conditions like trauma, childbirth, and various other medical and surgical life-saving procedures. In spite of extensive efforts and a number of blood donation programs being organized worldwide, the availability of blood remains too short to meet the demand. Students of health education form a potential source of eligible regular voluntary donors and also play a cruel role in motivating potential donors from the general population. Methods: A cross sectional study was conducted among the medical students and interns of Government Thiruvannamalai Medical College in July 2018. Universal sampling was done for this study. A pretested structured questionnaire was used for data collection. Data entry and analysis was done using SPSS software version 21. Results: Out of 460 students, 53.3% have adequate knowledge about blood donation. 57.8% of students have positive attitude towards blood donation. Only 31.4% of them have donated blood before and anaemia was found to be the main reason among non-donors for not having donated blood. Conclusions: More than half of the students have adequate knowledge and positive attitude towards blood donation. Less than one-third have donated blood. It is recommended that there is a need to adopt strategies to sensitize and motivate them towards voluntary blood donation early in their medical career.

Background: Alcohol use is prevalent among fisherman community. In this regard, a community based survey was conducted among adults in the fisherman community of Puducherry a) to determine prevalence of alcohol use, harmful use and probable dependence b) to assess the factors associated with alcohol use and harmful use of alcohol. Methods: A community based cross-sectional analytical study was conducted in a selected coastal commune Panchayat of Puducherry, South India during April, 2016 to March, 2017. The named streets were selected as the clusters. In each of the selected street first seven houses on the right hand side were enrolled. A semi structured questionnaire was used to collect details regarding socio-demographic variables and WHO AUDIT tool was used to detect the harmful use and probable dependence. Data was entered in Microsoft Excel and analyzed using Stata 12 software. The association between the individual’s characteristics and alcohol use, harmful use of alcohol were assessed using generalized linear models with poisson distribution and log link function. Results: The prevalence of alcohol use was 152 (61.5%, 95% CI- 55.4%-67.5%), 63 (25.5%, 95% CI- 20.4%-31.2%) had harmful use of alcohol and 20 (8.1%, 95% CI- 5.2%-12.0%) had probable dependence to alcohol. The multivariate regression showed that age between 31 to 59 years and tobacco use (1.7 (95% CI- 1.4-2.0)) were independently associated with alcohol use. The multivariate regression showed that being illiterate (2.1 (95% CI- 1.2-3.6)), being graduate (3.2 (95% CI- 1.5-6.6)), currently married (2.2 (95% CI-1.1-5.0)), tobacco use (1.4 (95% CI- 1.1-1.9)) and family history (1.4 (95% CI- 1.1-1.9)) were independently associated with alcohol use. Conclusions: The present study showed very high prevalence of alcohol use and harmful use of alcohol in coastal villages. Stringent regulatory approaches and effective health education approaches were much needed for the control of alcohol use and harmful use of alcohol.

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Background: In Tamil Nadu, the dengue outbreak is often associated with monsoon periods clubbed with draught. Basic population statistics such as incident rate was needed very much. Hence this study was planned a) to know the incidence rate of dengue fever in Kattampoondi primary health centre area in Thiruvannamalai district and b) to find out age-sex pattern of the cases.Methods: A longitudinal descriptive study was conducted among the residents of villages served by Kattampoondi primary health center during July to December, 2017. Four villages were selected by random sampling technique. The population came about 9385. Only confirmed dengue cases as per WHO case definition, during July to December 2017 were found and confirmed cases included thereafter.Results: The total dengue cases in the study area with a population of 9385 were found to be 75. Among 75 cases of dengue, 43 (57%) were males and 32 (43%) were females. Out of 75 cases, 36 (48%) cases occurred in the age group of 15 and above, 34 (45%) cases occurred between 5 to 15 years of age and 5 (7%) cases occurred among under five.Conclusions: When compared to state incidence rate, the incidence rate of this PHC area was significantly high. This might be due to good surveillance work. Though all age groups and both sexes are susceptible to dengue fever, personal protection might be the reason for low incidence rate among children with below 5 year of age.