"Assessing the Mother's Perspective of Childhood Diarrhea and Its Treatment in Rural Villages of Bénin"
In order to alleviate the gross health disparities that currently result in the deaths of almost 100,000 children under the age of five every year in Sub-Saharan Africa, it is first necessary to comprehend the traditions, old and new, of health and medicine that are prevalent among target populations. It is these varying healing traditions that help to shape the peoples' perception of a disease, diarrhea in this case, which in turn determines the manner in which a person will treat their child with particular disease.
Since in Sub-Saharan Africa, the woman is the dominant caregiver in the family, I analyzed the prevailing culture, attitudes, and perceptions of the causes, prevention, and treatment of childhood diarrhea in several rural villages in Southern Bénin directly from the perspective of mothers. I based my research out of Cotonou and traveled to nearby villages with a non-governmental organization called Environment-Santé-Education-Bénin to conduct the interviews. In addition, a portion of each interview was spent going over the recipe for home-made oral rehydration therapy and informing mothers about the benefits of using sleeping nets to prevent malaria. A significant portion of my findings also came from the data collected from interviews with traditional healers, leaves-sellers, street vendors and laboratory technicians, all of whom contribute significantly to the course of treatment of diarrhea in Southern Bénin. More importantly, the presence of these methods allows for the Beninoise mothers to proceed through a "trial and error' course of treatment, significantly lengthening the amount of time that the child is suffering from diarrhea and ultimately resulting in death. I found that the course of action taken by a mother to treat her sick child tended to be a function of education level and socio-economic status only after she had tried more traditional methods of treatment, which are a cultural norm in Bénin. The Beninoise mothers have immense trust in their healing tradition; these medicines work, but their potential efficiency is derailed by the lack of adequate diagnostic techniques.
The results of my findings suggest that the seemingly inherent disconnect between "traditional" medicine and biological medicine is simply a social construct. Bridging the gap that has been created between these treatments methods will promote efforts to better inform policies for long-term solutions to the problem of diarrheal disease, not only in Bénin, but in all places where children continue to die needlessly from it.