ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the complementary relationship between health education interventions and the anthropological research methods that help plan, implement, and evaluate those interventions. The concept of primary health care (PHC) encompasses a comprehensive, holistic view of health, a philosophy of self-reliance, and an emphasis on community involvement to develop culturally relevant and locally controlled services. The political neglect, poverty, and geographical dispersion of the study community made program growth a slow but challenging process requiring all the theoretical and practical resources of health education and anthropology. To identify the social and economic factors that influence the human behaviors associated with the transmission of the four target diseases in order to recommend appropriate educational interventions for controlling the diseases in the context of PHC. At the level of health promotion two broad groups of technologies were considered for guineaworm control: improvement of water supply and treatment of water from existing sources.
