THE AWARENESS AND ATTITUDE TOWARDS VACCINATION IN MAKKAH REGION, SAUDI ARABIA, 2019

In the last few years there have been a lot of argument and false accusations about vaccination, resulting in decrease the rate of vaccines uptake. Researches has shown that parents vaccines compliance are highly influence by many factors. This study aims to understand the reasons behind vaccine hesitancy and if the parents believe in the existence of the preventable diseases by vaccination? In this context, vaccine hesitancy defined as delay in acceptance or refusal of vaccines despite availability of vaccinations. This was a cross- sectional study conducted across Makkah, Jeddah, and Taif city. An online survey was distributed in period between 1 September – 1 November targeting Saudi parents of all children under the age of 12 randomly. The survey included demographics data, parental knowledge and attitude, vaccine hesitancy prevalence. The sample size was 384. Descriptive statistics were used to evaluate the association between knowledge and awareness to vaccines uptake. Analysis of the responses demonstrate that 93.6% of the sample study favor of vaccines, 6.1% of the sample study not favor of vaccines because they dont have adequate knowledge on vaccines, 2.5% of them think that vaccines are not important, 3.8% of them think that vaccines can cause harmful effects over its benefits, 1.5% of them have previous bad experience regarding vaccination. We found significant relation between knowledge and attitude score to the education level with level of significance 95% (p-value <0.05).Risingthe society education can help in minimizing the impact of vaccine hesitancy problem.