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phase, there is maximum educational and vocational input. The specific needs are
health, education and social well being; one cannot be divorced fmm the other.
A vast majority of these children have sub-standard health and consequently fall to
attain optimally healthy and productive adulthood. There are about 1,000 million school
children in the world today (Bundy and Guyatt, 1995). The problems encountered in this
stage are myriad. Using disability adjusted life years (DALY) metric, it has been
estimated that school age children suffer 11.0% of the total global burden of disease
and 97.0% of this burden is borne by children of the developing world. Tuberculosis,
intestinal helminths, injuries, respiratory disease,
malaria, Chagas disease,
Schistosomiasis, neuropsychiatric disorders, and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome
(AIDS) and other sexually transmitted diseases are some of the other common causes
of DALY loss (Bundy and Guyatt,1996). It was also estimated that 40.0% of the 1.000
million school age children are infected with intestinal worms (Sanoli et a1.,1996). In
addition, there are problems related to specific types of school age children like street
children, working children and handicapped children. These form specific problems
requiring independent studies and some of their issues have been addressed earlier
(Weale and Bradshaw,l980; Raju,1989; Banerjee, 1990; Banerjee,1992).
In our country, there are about 270 million school children forming 27.0% of the
population (Anonymous,l994). Health surveys in Indian schools indicate that morbidity
and mortality rates of children are among the highest in the world (Mahajan,l992).
Morbidity of school children has been studied in small surveys in many parts of the
country and most of these surveys have yielded more or less similar findings: the
general prevalence of morbidity being malnutrition (10.0%-98.0%), dental ailments