Md. Abdur Razzak^1,, Md. Asaduzzaman², Farha Matin Juliana¹, Ummay Sadia³, Syed Mahfuz Al Hasan⁴, Md. Sabir Hossain¹

Personal hygiene including hand washing, food preparation, and food diversification consciousness can be grown through nutrition education. A randomized controlled trial study was conducted on five hundred adolescent girls. In baseline study participants were randomly assigned to a control and an intervention group where both groups had the same number of adolescent girls. The hand hygiene behavior of 250 adolescent girls was studied to determine how hand washing practice and hygienic materials using practice changed by nutritional education, focusing on hand hygiene. In end line, 241 adolescent girls from intervention group and 236 from control group were interviewed. Most of the adolescents (more than 60%) washed their hands 2 times after defecation and before eating both in the control and intervention group. In the intervention group, hand wash practice after defecation, before eating, and before food preparation increased in 16% of adolescents where baseline was 20.0% and the end line was 36.1%. In where the percentage was almost same in the control group at baseline (27.2%) and end line (27.5%). Almost everybody (97.5%) in the intervention group washed their hands with soap and water at the end line of the study which was slightly less by 5.6% percentage at the base line of the study. Nutrition education increased the hand washing practicing behavior of the adolescents and the tendency to use hygienic materials for hand washing.

adolescence girls, behavior, hand-washing, nutrition education