Abstract:
A cross sectional study aimed to compare parasitic infection in community of migrant workers and local workers in the East Coast Region of Thailand. The sample was 414 workers who lived in the study area. Questionnaire was designed and tested for content validity and piloted before using it during the data collection stage. The reliabilities of study variables were between 0.73-0.81. Data were analysed using frequency, percentage, ratio, t-test, z-test and a chisquare test.The results showed that the migrant workers had a higher parasitic infection rate than the local wokers (p<0.05) especially workers from the North-east had 19 percent infection rate. This was 2.4 times higher than the rate of local workers. However, the areas comparison of communities which had less and more migrant had shown no difference. The total knowledge relating to parasitic infection of both groups of workers was less than fifty percent. The migrant workers had better knowledge than the local workers relating to food including tape worm and liver fluk worm. The infected workers had less knowledge than non infected ones (p<0.05). More migrant workers agreed on following question items than local workers (p<0.05) :- finding parasites in faces was normal, thread worms were so small and not a threast, having parasite in the body was healthy, working persons had less parasitic infection, skinny person had plenty of parasites, after treated liver fluke, the liver would be normal and Plara marinated with salt for 3 months would eliminated all parasites. Moreover, more the workers who had parasitic infection agreed on two question items than non infected persons (p<0.05) : parasite found in feces was normal and lime juice could cook meat. The results also showed the difference of workers' health behavior. The local workers had better health behavior than migrant workers (p<0.01). Workers having good health behavior had less infection than the others. The workers who changed bed sheet at least monthly, were less likely to be infected than workers who changed bed sheet less often. Compare with migrant workers. The local workers were likely to buy cooked food and eat less salad and Somtum (p<0.05), set table and eat newly cooked food (p<0.01), consume less fresh vegetable (p<0.05), rinse bought vegetables (p<0.05). However, one important behavior that bed to parasitic infection was that the workers who properly cooked food had lower parasitic infection than the other workers (p<0.05). The findings were applied to both home-cooking and outdoor-cooking (community gathering). Strategies in improving health of migrant workers by the provision of health education and knowledge relating to food sanitation can be designed based on the result of this study.