Abstract:
A community based descriptive cross sectional study on flat dwellers at Soysapura was
undertaken with the objectives of describing the socio-demographic and environmental
factors, describing the occurrence of selected communicable and non communicable
diseases and to describe their health seeking behaviour. A stratified simple random sample
of flats was used with an interviewer administered questionnaire to collect the data. The age
distribution was close to the normal urban population and there were 76 percentage of
nuclear families which was more than the urban population in Sri Lanka. The family size
was around 3.5 and it is comparatively smaller than the general population. Population
density is not ideal in most of the houses for health as 72 percentage of the families were in
the category of 50-100 square feet per person. Around 80 percentage of flat dwellers had
education above the level of O/L passed and 63 percentage of the households were below
the per capita income of US dollar 1 per day poverty line. Mosquitoes troubled 90
percentage of the households and coils (47 percentage) was the preferred repellent. 99
percentage of the households were satisfied with their water supply and the availability. Gas
was used by 94 percentage of the households as their main energy source of cooking. There
was lesser prevalence of communicable diseases among flat dwellers but prevalence of
chicken pox was comparatively high. The non communicable diseases appear to increase
with the advancing age of the flat dwellers and there was overall 11 percentage
Hypertension and 10 percentage diabetes among the age group of above 19 years.
Symptoms of musculoskeletal diseases also increased with the advancing age of the flat
dwellers. They prefen-ed western health practitioners for their general illnesses, 62
percentage in case of children and 75 percentage for adults. 60 percentage of adults used self
medication as a method of treatment for minor il1ness.
