Development of a community intervention programme on miners' health and working environment in Nicaragua

Since 1983, a broad research and development programme has been carried out with the support of Sweden through the Swedish Agency for Research Cooperation in Developing Countries (SAREC). One of the medical research and development projects deals with the environment and state of health of the population of an entire village, and is referred to as the Abdon Vega project. It is pursued by the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine of the University of León, Nicaragua, with the support of the Department of Social Medicine at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. The project comprises two stages. The first one centres on the state of health of the workers and the mining environment. This article reports on the objectives of the project and the study area. It presents experience from the development work up to now and the difficulties encountered.