In response to Tuesday’s column about two programs in India that train relatively uneducated women as their villages’ health workers, readers provided an avalanche of information about other community health worker programs around the world. Gregory Ortiz from London (95) wrote about Operation ASHA, which has semi-literate counselors treating tuberculosis in slums in India and Cambodia. In the field from Alaska (109) wrote about para-dentists in rural Alaska. Marianne Loewe (121) from Santa Ana, Calif., commented on her organization, Concern America, which works with health promoters in Colombia and Central America.

Several readers also noted that the idea of doctoring by lay people is not new; it was done on a colossal scale in China under Mao. In the Barefoot Doctor program, which began in the late 1960s, each commune trained workers to do basic preventive and curative health care, paying them in work points. When the communes were dissolved in 1981, so was the program. Many of the Barefoot Doctors became standard doctors, charging patients and concentrating on curative medicine.

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