ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the anthropological research in relation to an MSF project for children suffering from lead poisoning in northern Nigeria, undertaken in 2014. Responding to an outbreak in 2010, the MSF intervention was in large part successful, but faced serious challenges in one particular location, where blood lead levels remained high in a significant number of patients even after repeated treatment courses. The chapter describes these challenges and explains how the research managed to relate them to differences in health perception, social and economic factors, and, most importantly, to issues on the interactional level between the village population (parents of patients) and MSF. The research was done using diverse ethnographic methods and combined with analyses of the project’s extensive epidemiological data. Subsequently, the recommendations evolving from the research are discussed. The afterword outlines the current situation of the MSF project and explains how the recommendations were processed and contributed to substantially improved treatment results.
