Programs & Initiatives - Picturing Health Project

The Picturing Health Project will provide a simple and cost-effective way for technology to dramatically alter the lives and health of some of the poorest, most isolated people on Earth. If successful, it can be used as a model for other remote developing country populations throughout the world.

The Congo is the birthplace of many of the world’s most dangerous infectious disease. HIV, Ebola, Marburg and Monkeypox all originated in the remote jungle rainforests of central Africa. But because the region so inaccessible, it can take months to investigate new outbreaks. By then, a single infection can lead to an epidemic, putting millions of people at risk.

Congo BioMed’s first initiative, Picturing Health Project, will turn simple digital camera into a life-saving device. A village health worker with a digital camera can photograph health events (patients, animal die – offs, natural disasters) and transmit the images to the appropriate local and global health authorities, drastically reducing the crucial amount of time between infection and action.

The Picturing Health Project will address the issue of empowering local populations who have previously been unable to communicate with the outside world - to identify and clearly document critical health problems facing their local communities without relying on the written word. By using innovative methods to recognize and report important health-related events quickly wherever they occur, Picturing Health Project will push the boundaries of what is knowable about where, what, how and when the next pandemic, the next emerging communicable disease will arise.

Health care workers – including traditional healers and birth attendants, mid-wives, village health care workers, medical doctors and nurses -- in the Congo will be trained to document the health problems that they face through the lens of a digital camera. We will distribute these cameras in communities in which we already work in central Congo – one of the poorest, rural and remote regions of the world and collect images on a weekly basis, which can be used to document important health events and to promote dialogue about the needs and health priorities of the local communities.