Abstract

DIAZ MURILLO, María del Pilar; RAMIREZ SANCHEZ, Nohora Aidée  and  OSORIO GARCIA, Samuel David. THE SENSE OF INTESTINAL PARASITIC DISEASES IN AMERICAN POPULATIONS, IDENTIFYING BIOETHICAL DILEMMAS. rev.latinoam.bioet. [online]. 2013, vol.13, n.1, pp.96-111. ISSN 1657-4702.

Objective: Identifying meanings that American populations assign to parasitic intestinal diseases and raising potential conflicts or dilemmas in making-decision in various health activities result of the contact between traditional and biomedical perspectives. Methodology: Bibliographic review on intestinal parasites that met the inclusion criteria and supply insights for hermeneutics understanding of intestinal parasites and allow identify bioethical dilemmas for health activities resulting from contact between the emic and ethical visions (of biomedicine). Results: The social construction of parasitic intestinal diseases influences their perception of causality, harmfulness and as a health problem. This affects actions that people undertake to these diseases. People's perception of the diseases can be different to the health professionals. Sometimes ethnoanatomy is related to beneficial effects from the parasites. People recognize risk factors but this does not necessarily lead to preventive behaviors. Some researches recognize informative education without community participation is not successful because people do not feel motivated to transform your reality. There were established various bioethical dilemmas arising from contact between emic and biomedical perspectives. Conclusions: Emic approach allows us to understand people's logic about intestinal parasites. Although people recognize infection risks from an etic perspective, health officers' lack of understanding of emic perspective of parasitic intestinal diseases, and the poor living conditions cannot produce changes that affect the reduction on prevalence rates. Those facts will affect the success of care, prevention, promotion and health education programs. The emic perspective is not definitely. There are a lot of infrastructural conditions that developed different conflict situations for the work of the health professionals. They can provide elements for prevention and promotion strategies and programs, but depending on the socio-economical (poverty, community participation and empowerment) and political (i.e. leadership, formal commitments) conditions can be used or not. The last conclusion is that many ethical and moral problems must be analyzed by bioethics.

Keywords : Medical Anthropology; Parasitic Intestinal Diseases; Health Promotion; Health Education; Primary Health Care.

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