ABSTRACT

Lack of sensitivity to the health concerns of lay persons, and the introduction of educational messages that fail to take their health culture into consideration result in misinterpretation, the compartmentalization of information, and desensitization to priority issues. The international health literature is riddled with this sermon. Rather than engage in polemic, I will present a brief case study which illustrates why it is important to monitor how public health messages delivered by primary health care workers are interpreted by the populations they serve. The example is taken from Sri Lanka and concerns what might appear to be the most basic of health messages, “drink boiled cooled drinking water.”