An attempt to quantify the role of existing health facilities in controlling vesical schistosomiasis in rural northern Cameroon.

Around the artificial reservoir in the Benue River near Lagdo in Northern Cameroon, Schistosoma haematobium and S. mansoni are prevalent. The primary health care structure has been reinforced in recent years, but no special attention has been paid to schistosomiasis. This setting was considered ideal to estimate the contribution of the existing health facilities in the control of morbidity due to schistosomiasis. The patients locally diagnosed as having vesical schistosomiasis, were subsequently examined with a standardized quantitative filtration method. Furthermore, surveys were carried out in the surrounding villages to estimate the age-specific prevalences of vesical schistosomiasis in the health centre's catchment area. The number of heavily infected people is low in the region (12%), but heavy infections represented 64% of the visitors with vesical schistosomiasis at the health centre. The data suggest that the health centre is efficacious in 'passively' detecting the most heavy infections. It was also possible to identify villages with large numbers of heavily infected people from the health centre's records. Finally, a calculation model is presented to estimate the expected number of visitors to the health centre, based on data from the field survey.