Community-directed interventions improve primary health care
A recently-published, three-year, multi-country study demonstrates how community delivery of underutilized health interventions in an integrated manner can dramatically improve access to vital drugs and preventive treatments, particularly for malaria, in remote African communities.
ABUJA, NIGERIA - The sun has only recently climbed over the horizon as our crew assembles for the start of our journey. It is already hot and humid on this July day in Abuja, Nigeria. Ahead of us is a long day's drive over rough roads of dusty red potholes weaving through small markets. We are on a journey with a BBC television crew to see how a very remote, northern Nigeria community has been able to double appropriate malaria treatment among children (the documentary is available on the TDR website at www.who.int/tdr).
Our destination is Garbachede, a remote village in northeastern Nigeria, almost a 15 hour drive from the capital city, Abuja. Here evidence is emerging that rural Africans can dramatically reduce the burden of disease from malaria through community-directed programmes of treatment. How and why did such a programme begin?
How it began
The concept of community-directed treatment with ivermectin first took root in this area about 12 years ago, at a time when onchocerciasis was still an omnipresent disease across large swathes of west, central and eastern Africa. The parasitic infection by onchocerca volvulus causes people's legs to look like mottled tree trunks, bringing on severe itching and disfiguring skin lesions, and in many cases, eventual blindness (thus the popular name for the disease - “river blindness”).
Read the full article here http://www.who.int/tdr/publications/tdrnews/news80/cdi.htm
