Your Health ;
DOWN HOME Neighborhood
health care, from half a world
away, is what Mississippi doctor
Aaron Shirley (right) hopes to
bring to Baptist Town. His state
has some of the worst health
problems in the nation, and Shirley and others there are looking
to Iran for a fresh approach.
care consultant from Oxford, Miss. They met
with the doctors and public health officials who
built the Iranian system, visited rural “health
houses” and hospitals, and returned home convinced that the Iranian model could be just the
cure for what ails the perpetually ailing Delta,
and perhaps even the nation.
“The health house system in Iran is like the
German VW Beetle,” says Miller, of the Oxford
International Development Group. “It’s simple
and it works. It was developed by a country that
wasn’t too popular at the time, but it solved a ba-
sic transportation problem.”
Yes, he says, Iran is a rogue nation. But “if the
Iranians came up with a cure for cancer, would
we not use it just because we dislike their leaders?
This has nothing to do with politics,” Miller says.
In Iran’s health care system, remote village
health houses are the first line of defense, staffed
A small group of
health care professionals from
the U.S. and Iran
are quietly
working together to
practice a new
type of medicine
in Mississippi.
by villagers known as behvarzes. The behvarzes are
trained to provide basic
health services for villages
of up to 1,500 people. Male
behvarzes take care of sanitation, water testing and
environmental projects.
The women concentrate on
child and maternal health,
family planning, vaccinations and tracking each
family’s births, deaths and
medical histories. Iran, a
country roughly twice the
size of Texas, now has more than 17,000 health
houses and more than 30,000 behvarzes who
cover more than 90 percent of the rural population—about a quarter of the country’s 72 mil-
