Immunization its Relevance to Infants' Teething Complaint in Jos Nigeria

ABSTRACT Objective: To determine the relevance of immunization in the development of a healthy oral tissue among teething infants. Material and Method: A cross sectional study design of children aged 6-36 months were studied in 14 wards of Jos. A multistage sampling technique was adopted in selecting 1081 mothers. Their knowledge and perception of common teething complaint was obtained using structured interviewer questionnaire. The index children were examined for number and type of teeth erupted using mouth mirror under natural light. RESULT: The female babies constituted (50.2%) of the population. Eight hundred and one (74.1%) of the babies examined were fully immunized, while 264(24.4%) were partially immunized and 16(1.5%) did not receive any vaccination at all. Most of the mothers that failed to vaccinate their babies were either mother's with koranic education, elementary, secondary and none educated mothers. In the study 923 (85.4%) mothers believes that some of the complaint were as a result teething, while 86 (8.0%) believe they were not necessarily teething symptoms and 72 (6.7%) claimed no knowledge of the possible causes of the symptoms. The study revealed that the percentage of babies that were either fully or partially immunized that did not experience cough and diarrhea during teething was found to be statistically significant (p = 0.000). CONCLUSION: This study draws attention to the relatively poor anecdotal evidence related to symptoms associated with teething process. The study has shown that immunized infant are less likely to develop the symptoms otherwise ascribed to teething.