چكيده لاتين :
AIDS has been regarded as a great health problem in many countries in the recent years. By the end of year 2003 about 44 million people were reported to be infected by HIV. There are about 14000 patients in Iran who have been identified with the vims and it is estimated that there might be about more who havenʹt been identified, yet. Regard¬ing a change of the population being infected by the disease from IV drug abuser to those involved in high risk sexual relations, this study tends to pay attention to the population of women who are at risk. Furthermore, there are not many studies that have examined womenʹs knowledge about the disease; therefore, we decided to carry out this study be¬cause of the important role of women as mothers in Iranian sociality who play an educat¬ing role in their families.We conducted a cross sectional study on 500 women who came to the hospital for gy-necologic/obstetrics periodic checkups. A questionnaire was developed after pre-testing and standardization, which asked the participants about their gender, age and occupation as well as whether they knew someone close to them with HIV/AIDS. A five-ranking scale was used to score the answers. Using SPSS software version 14, the data were analyzed and a test of logistic regression revealed significant results in terms of their age, education and knowledge about AIDS (p<0.01).The average age of the participants 500 was 33.4±5/6 with Confidence Interval of 95%, ranging from 14 to 62 years old. Most of the participants were married (80.1%; N=407). In terms of their knowledge about AIDS on a 5-level scale, the results ranked as: excel¬lent (12.2%), good (24,6%), moderate (43.4%), weak (43,2%) and bad (5,6%). There were significant relations between the level of knowledge and education level (p=0,000) as well as that and age (p=0.00). There was not any relation between the participantsʹjob and their level of knowledge about AIDS (p>0.1).In our study, juvenile showed to have more knowledge about AIDS that can attribute to the education they have received. With a special attention to this age group, their knowl¬edge about sexual relations and using the same needle as the most frequent ways of spreading the infection was good. With respect to the Participantsʹ ideas, it seems TV is the best way of education. Thus, it is recommended that a medical team, including physi¬cians educate women in occasions such as a pre-natal care period and pregnancy visits.
