Habari — Liz Pavlovich: Fighting worm infection with community education

The environment in the areas surrounding Lake Victoria in northeastern Tanzania is ideal for the spread of the chronic disease, schistosomiasis. Human populations live in regular contact with fresh water.

The lifecycle of the three species of worms that cause schistosomiasis alternates between freshwater snails and human hosts. The disease burden around Lake Victoria, the region that Bugando’s hospital and university serve, is largely rural. The disease affects thousands of children, men and women, causing liver and spleen damage, genital lesions that increase the spread of HIV, and learning disabilities. Organizations such as CONTRAST are tackling this disease with preventive, diagnostic and curative techniques.

Earlier this month, I attended a presentation at the National Institute for Medical Research in Mwanza entitled “Socio-Economic Status of One Community Population Before and One Year After Schistosomiasis Control Intervention.”  The basic assumption of the presentation was that communities are less productive if they are riddled by diseases such as schistosomiasis and, therefore, a community health intervention would increase productivity and, likewise, wealth. Changes in simple behaviors tremendously reduce people’s risk and change their lives. In this study, community health workers taught the community about prevention strategies such as not bathing in the stagnant lake waters where one is more likely to be infested by the worms released by snails into the water. Wealth decisively increased amongst the 159 households surveyed after one year of education about schistosomiasis in the community, leading the researchers to conclude that the intervention had successfully affected the economic status of the community.

Like malaria and other infectious diseases that overwhelmingly plague the poorest populations in sub-Saharan Africa, schistosomiasis can be prevented at a low cost and with small behavioral changes. With education to target the communities and treatment readily available, we can stop the debilitation and morbidity caused by schistosomiasis.

Habari – News From Bugando – is a periodic blog posting by Liz Pavlovich, a Program Officer for the Touch Foundation who is based in Mwanza Tanzania. Since 2004, the Touch Foundation (www.touchfoundation.org) has been working with Tanzanian partners to address the health worker shortage by expanding the Bugando regional medical training college and teaching hospital. Bugando’s University is the second largest of five institutions training medical doctors in the country. It also trains health workers in seven other disciplines – post-graduate MDs, nurses, assistant medical officers, radiographers, pharmacists and laboratory technologists. The school is now training 900 students.