Breaking the cycle of parasitic diseases with edutainment: The intersection of entertainment and education.
Journal:
PLoS neglected tropical diseases
Published Date:
May 28, 2025
Abstract
Parasitic diseases represent a substantial public health challenge worldwide. Traditional educational strategies have often fallen short in driving sustained behavioral shifts that are nonetheless essential for reducing the burden of these diseases. Edutainment, a blend of education and entertainment, is the synthesis of pedagogical content with recreational frameworks, leveraging narrative and visual appeal to elevate the learning experience through enriched experiences, aligning with the principles of "warm cognition". Human cognitive processes, including attention, learning and memory, are influenced by emotions. As a result, emotional experiences are remembered vividly and accurately, with great resilience over time. Several edutainment approaches have been successfully utilized to inspire positive behavioral changes against soil-transmitted helminths (STHs), schistosomiasis, echinococcosis, and other diseases. This scoping review delves into several documented approaches with sustainable positive post-intervention outcomes. Approaches such as animated cartoons, gamification, songs, videos, and music, mobile health applications, hands-on experience, posters, comics and educational booklets, puppet shows, toy animals, cardboard and plastic-coated drawings, drawing activities and competitions, group discussions, illustrated booklets and questionnaires have yielded statistically significant improvements in participant's knowledge related to parasitic diseases (up to 60% increase in knowledge scores), alongside notable reductions in risks of parasite transmission and infection prevalence. These improvements highlight the potential of edutainment to enhance community awareness, promote long-term behavioral changes, and ultimately contribute to reducing spread of disease. Moreover, artificial intelligence (AI) can be integrated into edutainment approaches to meet the growing demand for personalized and effective learning methods. We argue that such AI-driven edutainment can underpin sustainable progress in the control of parasitic diseases.
