I laugh when I think back on my last blog post and my
genuine intention to publish a new post each week. 8 months later and here we
are. I can only apologise to the thousands of fans I have let down and
attribute it to the infamously busy student life of the last year (sometimes I
had more than two lectures a week!).
So far we’ve modestly looked at what jiggers actually are
and the impact that they have on individuals infected (see blog posts 1 and 2).
My original plan was to now look at the prevention of jigger infection and its
importance. However, I thought it more potent to answer a question that I get a
lot when I attempt to explain how jiggers can be combatted in the community.
The question being “Can we not just give them
shoes?” Now, I am not going to address the harmful “us” and “them” attitude
that this promotes (maybe at a later date), nor will I dismiss this question as
dull, in fact I would be worried if someone didn’t consider shoes as a viable
option for combatting jiggers. Unfortunately however, as I’m sure you can
imagine, it is just not that simple. In
fact I think the questioner knows this and is rather hinting at a broader
question being “what needs to be done to combat jiggers?” This then is the
question I will answer.
This question was roughly the principal focus of my
dissertation (final paper) for university and has taken up a lot of my precious
time (almost 8 months). Let me answer the question with another question or questions (I love questions!); firstly, what is our goal in combatting jiggers? Is it just to
treat jiggers once and then leave the patients to it, or should it be a
long-term commitment that ensures the patient will not be infected again after
treatment? Secondly, do we concern our “combatting jiggers” with the personal wellbeing
of the infected individual and lifting them out of poverty, which we learnt was
a serious problem in my last blog post? And also, do we aim to change the
misconception of jiggers in the community that is so damaging in the first place?
I would argue that if you want to truly combat jiggers you cannot leave out one
of these aspects.
We are therefore looking at a programme that focuses not
just on jigger treatment but also on prevention, community awareness and
ideally poverty alleviation. It is useless treating an individual if they are
then going to go home and become infected again just as it is useless focusing
on prevention if you’re not going to treat those who are already infected. They
go hand in hand. We are now all of a sudden looking at a pretty big programme;
at least it goes well beyond giving out shoes!
So we’ve established that combatting jiggers requires a more
comprehensive approach:
-
Treatment
-
Prevention
-
Community Awareness
I will look at each of these tasks individually and attempt
to explain what they entail related to jiggers. To kick us off in my next blog
post, we’ll be looking at the complications of how to treat jigger infection.
You can expect
this within the next 8 months.
Cheers
