Hesperian Health Guides has just added another new tool to our Digital Commons:  a mobile application for iPhone!   The app covers topics such as prenatal health, danger signs during pregnancy, birth and after birth, and 20 how-to items to teach health worker skills, such as how to take blood pressure. 

The app preserves Hesperian’s clear, friendly style, and its intuitive navigation is designed for anyone to easily find the information they are looking for.  Once downloaded to an iPhone, the information can be accessed from the most remote communities, with no Internet connection required.

 This app is a resource for international health and development workers; trainers of community health workers (CHWs); and other Mobile Health technology developers who may want to incorporate Hesperian’s unique content into their own projects.  As smartphones become more ubiquitous, we expect that more and more CHWs will be able to access Hesperian’s empowering health information in this format.

This app is a prototype that was designed in collaboration with our technical partner UnaMesa and a team of volunteer programmers.  Check it out and let us know what you think!  With ongoing support, we will continue to adapt our content for the small screen, including making this app available for android phones.

Download the app for free from the iTunes store.  Don’t have an iPhone? Click here to preview the app. 

Six advance chapters of the NEW Where There Is No Doctor are now available in our HealthWiki!  These are the first chapters completed of an all new, 21st-century edition of our hallmark publication.

 The chapters available online include:

• Newborn Babies and Breastfeeding (in Arabic, English, Filipino, French, Khmer, Lao, Portuguese, Spanish, and Urdu)
• Pregnancy and Birth (in English and Spanish)
• Caring for Children (in English) 
• Good Food Makes Good Health (in English)
• Belly Pain, Diarrhea, and Worms (in English)
• Water and Sanitation: Keys to Staying Healthy (in English)

The HealthWiki presents Hesperian content in a searchable wiki-based format that is well suited for slow or intermittent networks, and easy to edit and adapt for local use. 

Our Digital Commons also includes a searchable and downloadable online Image Library of over 10,000 of Hesperian’s health-related drawings, and our Health Materials Workshop – a simple on- or off-line layout program.

After decades of hearing stories of health workers cutting and pasting text from the health guides and tracing illustrations to create posters and flyers, we have created these online tools that make it far easier for users to pull text and images to create their own materials. They will be able to post their adapted material on the Health Materials Exchange so that others worldwide can benefit and learn from what they’ve created. Hesperian’s new digital tools empower communities to become producers of health information that is uniquely suited to their circumstances rather than consumers of one-size-fits-all content. 

Community Guide to Environmental Health supports local action to fight climate change

December’s Durban Summit on Climate Change (COP17) ended with governments demonstrating a singular lack of concern about the fate of our earth and our health. Thankfully, small farmers around the world are taking the future into their own hands and putting sustainable agriculture and agroforestry techniques into practice. Not only do they promote environmental health and mitigate climate change, they also improve their crop yields and their livelihoods.

 When farmers in Malawi intercrop “fertilizer trees” with maize, they provide shade, preserve moisture, resist erosion and boost the soil’s fertility.  Their maize yields double and they save the money they would have spent on poisoning the earth with chemical fertilizers.

 Principles and practices to improve health and turn back the tide of climate change can be found in Hesperian’s Community Guide to Environmental Health, which covers a wide range of environmental health topics including sustainable farming, forestry and reforestation and pesticide exposure.  Written in clear, simple language with an emphasis on integrating health promotion with environmental rights and justice, this book has proven invaluable around the world.

 Originally published in English, A Community Guide to Environmental Health is now available in Spanish, Pashto, Indonesian, Russian, Mongolian, Khmer and Turkish, with many more translations in progress! Purchase a copy for yourself or through our Gratis Books program to help fight climate change in a poor community.  If you purchase before the end of February, shipping is free!

This book is an excellent source of information about agriculture and health, and present l complex concepts of agronomy in an accessible way. As an agronomist myself, I appreciate this work, because often farmers themselves are the least informed about the consequences of industrial agricultural models.
-Saulo Araujo, Program Coordinator for Latin America, Grassroots International

A Book is a Gift for a Lifetime

Now through March 31st, 2012, if you make a Gift of Health through the Gratis Books program, it will be matched dollar for dollar by the generosity of the Wang-McLaren Foundation. This means that each gift you make will go twice as far—and for the price of one book, you can enable us to send two!

Each month, Hesperian receives 150 to 200 requests for resources from people who need health information but cannot afford to buy it. These requests come from poor, rural, and marginalized communities around the world and from people like Emmanuel Villalon, who lives in rural Mexico where there are very few resources for his blind son. He writes,

My wife and I are using the techniques described to teach our 5-year-old son to eat on his own and dress himself.  We are also learning about the feelings experienced by children who are blind, and that our son Leonardo is now at the age when children start to become aware of their disability.  The book has also helped me to understand how important it is for him to interact with other children.  My goal this year is for him to start going to school. Many many thanks to all of our friends at Hesperian!

Hesperian’s Gratis Books program was set up to provide individuals and communities in need with free copies of Hesperian resources. For a gift of just $25, you can ensure that a book is sent to someone like Emmanuel who is making his or her community healthier. Don’t miss this wonderful opportunity! Between now and March 31st any gift you make will be doubled, thanks to the dollar-for-dollar match by the Wang-McLaren Foundation.

Hesperian books are a simple way to make a gift with wide reaching impact. Join us in pursuing Health for All!

 “A society that places a low value on its mothers and the process of birth will suffer an array of negative repercussions for doing so. Good beginnings make a positive difference in the world, so it is worth our while to provide the best possible care for mothers and babies throughout this extraordinarily influential part of life.”
- Ina May Gaskin

Renowned midwife, author and Hesperian friend Ina May Gaskin has been honored with the Right Livelihood Award – often referred to as the “Alternative Nobel Prize” — “for her whole-life’s work teaching and advocating safe, woman-centred childbirth methods that best promote the physical and mental health of mother and child.”

 At the awards ceremony in Sweden this week, Ms. Gaskin said:

 “I accept the Right Livelihood Award in the name of the midwives, physicians, doulas, and birth activists who affirm childbirth as a creative act, best performed by the mother in the setting of her choice, without unnecessary medical interference being imposed upon her.”

Hesperian shares this perspective, which is in keeping with our commitment to the empowerment of women and their families to take charge of their health and fully participate in their own care.

Ina May Gaskin was a technical reviewer of Hesperian’s publication A Book for Midwives, which she said is “comprehensive…beautifully written and illustrated… our best tool so far for preventing unnecessary deaths.”  Hesperian is currently distributing Ms. Gaskin’s most recent book, Birth Matters.   

Also check out the other midwifery titles on Hesperian’s Health & Empowerment bookshelf : Childbirth picture book (in English, French, and Spanish); and a series on Life-Saving Skills produced by the American College of Nurse-Midwives.

Congratulations Ina May Gaskin!

We encourage you to try out our new digital tools and let us know what you think!

Hesperian Images

Hesperian Images is an online image library containing thousands of Hesperian’s world renowned illustrations now available to all!  Click here to browse our collection, or register now to download images while the free trial period lasts!

Our Health Materials Workshop

The Health Materials Workshop is a new online tool to help you design flyers, posters and brochures using Hesperian text and images.  Help us test a beta version of the workshop by following this link.  For detailed instructions, click here or email us at hesperian@hesperian.org.  Watch a short video to learn more about the project here. 

 Your feedback helps us to improve these tools and further empower people to adapt and share our materials online.  Here’s what one user has told us:

 I am a long time fan of Hesperian.  I now work for Penda Health, an organization that is bringing world class women’s health services to low-income women in Kenya. We are just getting started and we are developing our health materials.  I love Hesperian’s books – but we want to include in some cases more and in some cases less information than is in each chapter. Our pages of health information look dry and bland – so I thought adding a picture or two from your image library would do the trick! We will use the pictures from Where Women Have No Doctor and A Book for Midwives.

I really can’t say enough about how wonderful I think Hesperian is – I would love the opportunity for Penda Health and Hesperian to work more closely together, so please let me know how I can help you develop this great new tool.  (Stephanie Koczela, Founding Team, Penda Health)

By testing and using these new tools you become part of the Hesperian Digital Commons, an ongoing collaborative project to re-imagine our widely known and trusted print materials through the innovative use of digital technology.  

Take a look at our most recent additions in our bookstore!

Global Health Watch 3: An Alternative World Health Report 

Like its critically acclaimed predecessors, this third volume of Global Health Watch covers a wide range of topics, including food, trade, access to medicines, mental health, climate change, and war and conflict. This volume includes a special focus on health systems and their relation to world economic crises.  Global Health Watch 3 is a project of the Peoples’ Health Movement, of which Hesperian is an active member, and a trustworthy source of data and analysis on global health.

The Practice of International Health: A Case-Based Orientation 
Edited by Daniel Perlman and Ananya Roy

Virtually every school of public health teaches a global health course, yet the major textbooks provide little about what is actually like to practice international health. This new book comprises a series of vivid first person accounts in which physicians, epidemiologists, health workers, and public health professionals from around the world present the critical dilemmas and challenges facing the field.

Birth Matters: A Midwife’s Manifesto 
by Ina May Gaskin. Foreword by Ani Difranco

In Birth Matters, America’s leading midwife, Ina May Gaskin – who was recently selected to receive a Right Livelihood Award! – reminds us that the ways in which women experience birth have implications for us all. A woman who gives birth in the US today is more likely to die in childbirth than her mother was. The US ranks behind 33 other nations in neonatal mortality rates, and 40 other nations in maternal mortality rates. Confidence in women’s bodies and women’s choices has been lost. Birth Matters is a spirited manifesta showing us how to trust women, value birth, nurture families, and reconcile modern life with a process as old as our species.

Revolutionary Doctors 
by Steve Brouwer

This first-hand account of Venezuela’s innovative and inspiring program of community health care shows what happens when doctor-teachers move into the countryside and poor urban areas to provide care, and then to recruit and train doctors from among farmers and workers.  Revolutionary Doctors demonstrates how a society committed to the well-being of its poorest people can actually put that commitment into practice by delivering essential health care through the direct empowerment of the people it aims to serve.

Jamkhed: A Comprehensive Rural Health Project 
by Doctors Mabelle Arole and Rajanikant Arole

Jamkhed is the story of poor and disenfranchised men and women who developed a sustainable community-based primary health care program in the town of Jamkhed, Maharashtra, in one of the poorest parts of India.  Begun by Doctors Mabelle Arole and Rajanikant Arole in 1970, the Comprehensive Rural Health Project (CRHP) has been a catalyst for social change and positive transformation in Jamkhed and the surrounding villages ever since. This book details the early years and shares the experience of developing the project from inception to sustainability.

A 2011 update of Hesperian’s widely used guide to women’s health is now available in both English and Spanish in two new formats:

• A brand new online format that makes it much easier to read information online, search by topic, move between languages, and edit and adapt Hesperian materials for local needs.

• As a CD-ROM for easy transport or for use on computers without internet access. 

Where Women Have No Doctor and Donde no hay doctor para mujeres are the first complete Hesperian books to be introduced in the new wiki-based format as part of the Hesperian Digital Commons, an ongoing collaborative project to re-imagine our widely known and trusted print materials through the innovative use of digital technology. 

Help us to test a new online tool

We are currently testing and improving a beta version of our online Health Materials Workshop, where health educators can design customized flyers, posters and brochures using Hesperian source text and images.  You can help us by trying out this new tool and giving us feedback.  If you would like to do so, please contact us at hesperian@hesperian.org.  

The 2011 reprint of Where There is No Doctor includes updated information on antibiotic use and dosage for several infections such as UTIs, whooping cough, and appendicitis; on malaria treatment in accordance with the latest WHO guidelines; on how signs of heart attacks in women differ from men; and much more!

Until the end of November, we are offering a 30% discount on all bulk orders (5 or more copies) of Where There is No Doctor.  Click here [link] to purchase Hesperian’s signature health guide!

You’ll notice that the 2011 reprint of Where There is No Doctor features Hesperian’s new logo and new name, Hesperian Health Guides!  The name more accurately reflects the work we’ve done for more than 30 years and will continue to do as we recommit ourselves to producing Knowledge for Action. Action for Health.

During our transition to the new site over the past few days, we have experienced some problems with our online store.  We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused – everything should be working fine now!

You will notice that we have also transformed our name – to Hesperian Health Guides. It reflects more accurately the work we’ve done for more than 30 years and will continue to do as we recommit ourselves to producing Knowledge for Action. Action for Health.

Where There Is No Dentist, Hesperian’s newly updated companion book to Where There Is No Doctor, gives clear, simple instructions to help individuals take care of their gums and teeth before they become severe problems.  This invaluable resource teaches health workers, educators and individuals to prevent, recognize and treat common dental problems. Topics covered include dental exams, diagnosis of common dental problems, making and using dental equipment, using local anesthetics, placing fillings, removing teeth, and detailed material on HIV/AIDS and oral health.

This new edition, updated in 2011, features a new section on “Meth Mouth” – problems of the teeth and gums that result from the use of the addictive drug methamphetamine, used by increasing numbers of people around the world – and an updated resource section.

Act for health.  Purchase your copy of the new 2011 edition of Where There is No Dentist today!  Order five or more copies and receive a 20% discount.

Hesperian Offers a Training Guide for Midwives

The first report to comprehensively explore current midwifery practices across the globe, the State of the World’s Midwifery 2011: Delivering Health, Saving Lives, was released last month by the International Confederation of Midwives in Durban, South Africa.

The report reaffirms the crucial role of skilled birth attendants – especially midwives – in addressing maternal and newborn mortality, in promoting women’s and children’s health, and in spurring development.  Hesperian’s widely-used health guide A Book for Midwives is a key resource in this effort.

The report recognizes the constraints and challenges that midwives, most of whom are women, face in their lives and work and calls for greater investment in training for midwives and expanded access to their services. Written precisely for women health workers confronting these conditions, A Book for Midwives has proved a vital resource for practicing midwives and midwifery training programs around the world. This book covers the essentials of care before, during, and after birth, providing a variety of designs for low-cost equipment and training materials, and has been extensively updated and revised in both the English and Spanish editions to reflect new WHO/UNICEF guidelines and standards for mothers and newborns.

Available now in print and CD, A Book for Midwives covers:

• helping women stay healthy during pregnancy
• helping mothers have safer labors and births
• preventing, managing, and treating obstetric emergencies
• breastfeeding
• the health needs of new babies
• involving the community in improving the health of mothers and pregnant women.

It also includes information about:

• treatment and medications for HIV and other STIs during pregnancy
• prevention of parent to child transmission of HIV (PPTCT)
• vaccinations, medicines, and drug interactions
• infection prevention
• improved methods for dealing with complicated deliveries
• expanded information on family planning and reproductive health.

Heavily illustrated, clearly written, and developed with the participation of community-based midwives, midwifery trainers, and medical specialists around the world, it is equally useful in a rural village or urban clinic, as a training manual for students or as a reference for an experienced midwife.

What people have to say about A Book for Midwives:

“As in Where There is No Doctor, the Hesperian Foundation has again created a clearly written and culturally sensitive book which can be used by healthcare providers throughout the world who care for women and their babies and families…an excellent resource providing accurate technical information.”
-Kathy Herschderfer, Secretary General
International Confederation of Midwives

“This comprehensive text for midwives is beautifully written and illustrated for teaching purposes in areas of the world in which maternal and newborn morbidity and mortality are quite high. The book is our best tool so far for preventing unnecessary deaths.”
-Ina May Gaskin, author of Spiritual Midwifery and Birth Matters

The report calls for innovative programs and policies that empower people living with disabilities and remove the barriers which prevent them from participating in their communities, getting a quality education, finding decent work, and having their voices heard. A practical manual for doing exactly that, Hesperian’s A Health Handbook for Women with Disabilities, is filled with descriptions of activities and programs that have been proven to work in a multiplicity of settings.

The WHO report underscores the message in Hesperian’s publications about care for people living with disabilities.  A Health Handbook for Women with Disabilities, developed with the participation of women with disabilities in 42 countries, helps women to overcome the barriers of social stigma and inadequate care which they identify as often the biggest barriers to improving their general health, self-esteem, and abilities to care for themselves and participate in their communities.  Topics include:

• Organizing for disability-friendly health care
• How to care for daily needs with limited access to equipment
• Having healthy and safe sexual relationships
• Which family planning methods work best for which disabilities
• Pregnancy and childbirth
• How to defend against violence or abuse.

You can read more about A Health Handbook for Women with Disabilities here. All of our titles are available in Spanish here.

Other relevant Hesperian publications include Disabled Village Children: A Guide for Community Health Workers, Rehabilitation Workers, and Families; Helping Children Who are Deaf; and Helping Children Who are Blind.

Guía comunitaria para la salud ambiental

For a limited time, get free shipping of Guía comunitaria para la salud ambiental! Order the title from our on-line bookstore now and we will ship it to you free of charge. This free shipping offer does not apply to bulk orders. For great deals on bulk discounts, please contact our order department at bookorders@hesperian.org or 1-510-845-4507.

Originally published in English in 2008, A Community Guide to Environmental Health is now available in Pashto, Indonesian, Russian, Mongolian, and Khmer, with many more translations in progress. The Spanish edition has been adapted and translated based on extensive review by Hesperian partners in Latin America and the US.

This unique resource is being used by health and development workers, teachers, environmental activists, community leaders, and others around the world working to improve the health of people and the environment.  Using clear explanations, illustrations, activities, and stories, Guía comunitaria para la salud ambiental provides practical, hands-on solutions for communities addressing today’s pressing environmental health problems in both small villages and large cities.

The book’s 23 chapters cover topics including:

• preventing and reducing harm from toxic pollution
• forestry, restoring land, and planting trees
• protecting community water and watersheds
• food security and sustainable farming
• environmental health at home
• solid waste and health care waste
• how to reduce harm from mining, oil, and energy production

With dozens of activities to stimulate critical thinking and discussion; instructions for simple technologies such as safe toilets, safe cleaning products, and water purification methods; and hundreds of drawings to make the messages clear, Guía comunitaria para la salud ambiental offers hope and inspiration for people just beginning to address environmental health threats as well as those with many years of practical experience.

* * *

“You have produced something quite extraordinary. The Community Guide will certainly be much used for the benefit of poor communities around the world. Too little has been done to provide this type of practical and useful information to communities. The human rights approach in the guide is especially useful.”
- Ingvar Andersson, former Head of Water Division, Swedish International Development Cooperation (Sida)

“Community work, especially our water and sanitation programs, are more effective and efficient when we have tools that meet the needs and expectations of the communities. Hesperian produces materials so creative and communicative, and of such quality and precision, that they allow us to respond to the many common problems of communities while recognizing that each case is unique. The flexibility of these materials makes them useful in a wide variety of social and geographic contexts.”
- Feliciano dos Santos, ESTAMOS, Mozambique
Winner of the 2008 Goldman Environmental Prize for Africa