"Can we not just give them shoes?"

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