OCP-85.5-Eng.Pdf
ocP/ 85 . 5 I^IORLD HEAITH ORGANIZATION onchocerclasis Control Programme in the Volta Rlver Basin area B.P. 549 - Ouagadougou t Burkina Faso ONCHOCERCIASIS FOCUS IN THE BISSA COUNTRY by A. Rolland and G. BalaY New edltion, November 1985 I ocP/8s.5 Page 2 FOREWORD The rernarkable work by A. Rolland and G. Balay on the onchocerclasis focus in the Blssa country, which was greatly in advance of its time (f969), was unfortunately never publlshed, although it thoroughly nerited to be so; havlng remained a report of the Onchocerciasls DepartnenE of OCCGE, it r.ras known only to t.he privileged few, for whom i.t was a valuable source of reference. Ihis document is ln effect the result of the first rational mulEidiscipllnary approach to a focus of onchocerclasis; several of the ideas put forward in it have now become basic to the epideniology of the disease; although the work of a physician and an entomologlst, the socloeconomic study that it enbodles was to be the startlng point for the research of those ethnographers and geographers who were to concern themselves wlth onchocerciasis during the next 15 years. At the time when the report was produced, no onchocerciasls control canpaign had been undertaken ln the east of rrhat is now Burkino Faso. Preclse and sober as 1t is, this report gives a.moving descrlption of the catastrophlc situation that prevailed at the tine in the Volta river valleys wlth regard to health and the socioecononlc sltuatLon, a situation which also existed in all the valleys of the major watercourses in the West African savannas; this viclous circle of disease and poverty led lnevitably to the bllndness and early decline of individuals and to the death of their cornmunltles.
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