Participatory epidemiology in animal and human health

Editor's Notes

1. What we are going to describe is a qualitative approach to epidemiology. This is probably very different from the approaches you have been trained in and practice on a daily basis. Some of you may not like what you hear, others will be intrigued. It has a lot to do with how each of us views information and knowledge.
2. The pictures here shows a Pakistani PE practitioner talking to a traditional healer. The man had a lot of information about rinderpest cases for which livestock keepers had asked his assistance in stead of that from the vet services despite that RP was notifiable. The reason? The clinical presentation of the disease was different from what people knew as RP and they had therefore not recognized it as such…
3. As outlined here, there are both pros and cons to quantitative and qualitative epidemiology methods which vary from the way data is obtained, the sustainability of the programs and the data analysis. In this presentation we will not advocate for the exclusive use of qualitative epidemiological methods such as Participatory Epidemiology (PE) instead, we believe that surveillance systems both human and animal should be a combination of methods to get to a win-win situation.
4. In PE we do a lot of data checking in order to ensure data quality and better understand the data collected and its context.
5. An example of a first hand report is when the mother tells you that the child pictured here had measles 3 months ago. Sometimes it may not have happened in their family but the community members agree that several measles cases occurred among young children in the village 3 months ago. Reports obtained from inquiry: you’re conducting participatory disease surveillance for measles but when asking about the most common childhood diseases measles is not mentioned… in that case you may want to probe if indeed they have not had measles cases. In this case the community did not volunteer the information itself only when you asked and therefore this should be taken into account when scoring evidence.
6. SSI: Checklists >< questionnairesOpen-ended questionsDiscoveryNon-leadingProbingDiagnostics: field kits supported by laboratory support
7. These timelines developed by the community illustrate the chronology of the different events in their villages and was used to inform a decision support tool that would further inform policy makers.
8. PE in animal and human health goes beyond zoonoses. We work with communities to understand the challenges and problems and try to work towards a viable solution. Often to address one aspect you need to approach it via a different angle. An example is linking the polio vaccination with RP vaccination.
9. Ongoing study in West Kenya by multidisciplinary team (vets, MPH, environmental health and a sociologist).Team members recruited from the people we trained during the past 2 years. For more information on GEMS and GEMS-ZED: ask Darryn Knobel.