Dear CHIFA colleagues,
A paper in The Lancet Child and Adolescent Health calls for more funding to reduce the burden of snakebite in children.
Prioritising snakebite in the child and adolescent health agenda
Soumyadeep Bhaumik, Geetha R Menon, Abdulrazaq G Habib
Comment| volume 7, issue 11, p753-755, november 2023download full issue
Published:September 29, 2023DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/S2352-4642(23)00224-9
Here are three of their recommendations:
'Focus on prevention through One Health Approaches and community-based interventions on snakebite, which are codeveloped with communities and local stakeholders and tested through implementation research.
Evaluate primary health-care systems comprehensively to understand structural and functional capacity of snakebite care and assess continuum of care, its access, and quality.
Development of high-quality regional guidelines on snakebite in children and adolescents by WHO.'
The above suggests there are no regional WHO guidelines on snakebite in children and adolescents. Are there indeed global guidelines?
High-quality guidelines are necessary but not sufficient. The real challenge is for care to match the guidelines. I suspect that this is seldom the case. Such care starts at the moment snakebite occurs, how relatives and bystanders respond, and the decisions made at the interface with the health system, typically by resource-poor primary health workers. What can we learn from efforts to meet the information needs of lay people and primary health workers? What efforts are effective for community health education? What is the role of national treatment protocols and inititatives such as Practical Approach to Care Kit?
Best wishes, Neil
HIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of HIFA (Healthcare Information For All), a global health community that brings all stakeholders together around the shared goal of universal access to reliable healthcare information. HIFA has 20,000 members in 180 countries, interacting in four languages and representing all parts of the global evidence ecosystem. HIFA is administered by Global Healthcare Information Network, a UK-based nonprofit in official relations with the World Health Organization. Email: neil@hifa.org
