Social Science Contributions to BU Focused Health Service Research in West-Africa

Health social science (HSS) research has contributed in significant ways to our understanding of how rural communities in West Africa perceive and respond to Buruli ulcer (BU), and the challenges facing those involved with BU health service delivery. These challenges range from the need to mount more effective community outreach education programs leading to earlier BU detection to the need to identify and then address predisposing, enabling, and service delivery related factors that result in treatment delay, drop out, and non-adherence. In this chapter, we briefly highlight HSS research that has broadened our knowledge of community response to BU and then consider HSS-inspired BU interventions. Most of the sources we draw upon involve research carried out in Benin, Cameroon, and Ghana. To date, few HSS studies have been conducted in other endemic countries such as Cote d’Ivoire, The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria and Uganda. We include in our overview a selection of studies conducted by both social scientists and medical researchers investigating social and cultural factors that influence health care decision-making.