Documenting the health consequences of endemic warfare in three pastoralist communities of northern Kenya: a conceptual framework.

Violent conflict represents the third most important source of mortality around the world, yet violence-related mortality remains profoundly undercounted (Krug, Dahlberg, Mercy, Zwi, & Lozano, 2002). As a step toward documenting the consequences of even the "smallest wars" we offer a conceptual framework for a recently initiated project that comparatively examines the direct and indirect consequences of intercommunity violence among Pokot, Samburu, and Turkana herding communities of Northern Kenya. While a substantial body of work has accumulated on the social responses to this violence very little is known about the differential impacts on community health. Based on our cumulative ethnographic experience in the area, we offer a conceptual framework that merges a context-sensitive ethnographic approach with a comparative epidemiological one centered on documenting the lived experience of violence and inequality. In this paper, we provide evidence for the importance of a contextualized approach detailing how social environments that include chronic episodes of violence produce variations in health. We do so by presenting the results of previous work to highlight what is known and follow this by identifying what remains to be understood about how violence, inequality, and health interact in these communities. While much is known about the importance of access to livestock herds for health, nutrition, and child growth in this difficult physical environment, far less is known about how the social responses to violence interact with access to herds to create new patterns of nutrition and health. With respect to pastoralists, additional areas that remain only nominally understood include age-specific mortality patterns, reproductive health, and psychosocial/mental health, topics that we view as central to the current study. In sum, we suggest that health offers one of the most useful tools for examining the costs of violence by creating opportunities for advocacy.

Ethnopharmacological survey of Samburu district, Kenya.

BACKGROUND: Ethnobotanical pharmacopoeia is confidently used in disease intervention and there is need for documentation and preservation of traditional medical knowledge to bolster the discovery of novel drugs. The objective of the present study was to document the indigenous medicinal plant utilization, management and their extinction threats in Samburu District, Kenya. METHODS: Field research was conducted in six divisions of Samburu District in Kenya. We randomly sampled 100 consented interviewees stratified by age, gender, occupation and level of education. We collected plant use data through semi-structured questionnaires; transect walks, oral interviews and focus groups discussions. Voucher specimens of all cited botanic species were collected and deposited at University of Nairobi's botany herbarium. RESULTS: Data on plant use from the informants yielded 990 citations on 56 medicinal plant species, which are used to treat 54 different animal and human diseases including; malaria, digestive disorders, respiratory syndromes and ectoparasites. CONCLUSION: The ethnomedicinal use of plant species was documented in the study area for treatment of both human and veterinary diseases. The local population has high ethnobotanical knowledge and has adopted sound management conservation practices. The major threatening factors reported were anthropogenic and natural. Ethnomedical documentation and sustainable plant utilization can support drug discovery efforts in developing countries.