[Infantile diarrhea in Senegal: epidemiologic survey in a suburb of Dakar]

Before the launching of a national program against diarrhoea in Senegal it was interesting to survey the exact impact of this disease on the under 5 children and the way the mothers and the community are dealing with it. We investigated a very crowded suburb of Dakar where we found that diarrhoea was the first cause of death among under five children. This investigation showed us that Oral Rehydration Therapy (ORT) is widely known by the approximately 1000 mothers interviewed, thanks to the gambian and senegalese broadcasts . However, only 1% of the mothers consider it as a useful and efficient treatment of diarrhoea. Expansive and inefficient medical treatments as well as traditional therapy are systematically preferred to ORT. We analyzed the reasons of that failure and we proposed a new strategy to generalize the use of ORT.