During the first week of October a multidisciplinary team formed of public, animal and environmental health professionals joined forces in Western Kenya. The 6 PE practitioners were recruited following the advertisement posted on the PENAPH virtual community of practice in August 2010. The remaining team members are staff from the US Centres for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC) based in Kenya and the Kenyan Medical Research Institute (KEMRI) and from ILRI. The objectives of the pilot study are as follows:

• Determine the perceived causes of childhood diarrhea and the perceived relative contribution of enteric zoonoses in childhood morbidity and mortality using participatory epidemiology.
• Compare and contrast the results of the participatory epidemiological study with those of the ongoing CDC/KEMRI case-control studies. For more information on the already ongoing CDC/KEMRI project see: GEMS-ZED

The activities are divided in 3 phases:

• 4-8 October: Refresher course & 2 day field work: Establish an understanding of community perceptions of childhood diarrhea, the major causes, treatments, prevention methods and impacts.
• 1-2 November: phase 2 (2 day field work): Share with community members the info on lab data compared and contrasted with information from the community à interpret both sets of data in participatory manner and collectively find prevention/treatment/education methods/risk factors of importance.
• 6-9 December: phase 3 (2 day field work & 2 day write up): Reinforce importance of prevention and education about risk factors. Determine if the community continues to share beliefs previously discussed.