[Learning to prevent dehydration in distant Mexican communities and markets]

Child mortality due to diarrheal diseases is high in Mexico. Official records reported 14,000 children died in 1990 of this cause. Yet, we do not know the real extent of the problem since unregistered child deaths in our countryside seem to be far more frequent than acknowledged by government information. Most of these deaths occur among poor peasants and indigenous people living far from medical services. There are more than 100,000 communities with less than 500 inhabitants. This population does not benefit from medical services due to several problems, such as accessibility and linguistic and cultural gaps. In order to promote Oral Rehydration Therapy (ORT) within these communities, the authors implemented an education strategy, aimed at this specific population, to enhance their learning of prevention of diarrhea and dehydration, and thereby to increase their use of ORT. While rendering account of research devised to prove the extensibility to larger scales of methods formerly tried at an experimental (pilot) level, this paper further discusses and reinforces the contribution of the insights of a critical sociology epistemological framework in planning and conducting sociological interventions in the field of health as well as in any other field. The basic assumption of this point of view is that to adopt rationalized solutions to their problems (e.g. the prevention of dehydration of their children by means of the ORT) people should have the opportunity to deliberate rationally about them in order to be able to justify or validate their actions regarding the course of events and the opinions and norms of their closest community.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)