I’m trying not to make my commentary about the current Ebola outbreak about representation, but I’ve been a bit troubled by the political analyses accompanying the epidemiological and health systems ones. Specifically, I want to talk a bit about how Liberia’s and Sierra Leone’s civil wars have been deployed by these analysts to understand the response to the outbreak and how explaining existing tensions requires some deeper knowledge about local context. Laurie Garrett’s recent opinion piece on CNN and her appearance on Melissa Harris-Perry’s show are both examples of
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And he told them about this new God, the Creator of all the world and all the men and women. He told them that they worshipped false gods, gods of wood and stone. A deep murmur went through the crowd when he said this. He told them that the true God lived on high and that all men when they died went before Him for judgment. Evil men and all the heathen who in their blindness bowed to wood and stone were thrown into a
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On the 5th of September, 2014, the blog Konakry Express recounted a report from Mme Fatou Baldé Yansané that there are severe shortages of gloves in health facilities in Guinea. Mme Baldé Yansané writes that midwives have only one or two pair of gloves each week. As a consequence, they have to reuse gloves or merely rub their hands with chlorine after consultations. This message was written over five months after the WHO’s confirmation of an Ebola outbreak in Guinea on their webpage. When I read the blog
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The growing Ebola virus outbreak not only highlights the tragedy enveloping the areas most affected but also offers a commentary on they way in which the political ecology in West Africa has allowed this disease to become established. The narrative goes that the virus appeared spontaneously in the forest villages of Guinea in December 2013. But this is debatable given that there is evidence of antibodies the Ebola virus in human blood from Sierra Leone up to five years previously. Previously only one case of Ebola had been
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Held as part of the African Studies Association conference 2014, Ebola: The Challenges united an esteemed panel of speakers to discuss ways in which academia can mobilise to support those effected by the ebola outbreak.
After long months of relative silence, the world finally heatedly debates on Ebola. The quantity of aid is widely considered to be the major problem. The quality of the aid being offered however, is not under scrutiny. Everybody seems to agree that all the outbreak needs is: more clinics, more medical personnel, more military personnel and central coordination. All this is, of course, necessary. It is questionable though, why and how foreign soldiers will be deployed. The slogan the United Nations uses for the Ebola
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As the worst Ebola epidemic on record shows no signs of abating in West Africa, fear and ignorance are increasingly said to be playing a role in its continued spread. Meanwhile, local practices such as the consumption of bushmeat and deforestation are the go-to explanations for the epidemic’s underlying causes. However, decades of anthropological research in the region by STEPS Centre and Institute of Development Studies (IDS) researchers, indicates not only that this picture is an over-simplification, but that disease control policies based on these ideas may be unhelpful. View full blog here
Some materials are now available from the recent Sussex Development Lecture on Equality, Sustainability, Security: Interlaced challenges in a global development eraby former STEPS Director Melissa Leach. The text is available to download below as a PDF, and you can listen to Melissa’s lecture online, courtesy of the Institute of Development Studies. In the lecture, Melissa uses Ebola as a lens to look at how inequalities, unsustainability and insecurity can interact, enhanced by misguided interventions, to render people and places deeply vulnerable. Addressing these interactions
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Ebola is threatening gains made in health systems strengthening in post conflict Sierra Leone. The ReBUILD consortium working in partnership with College of Medicine and Allied Health Sciences (COMAHS) in Freetown has been assessing the opportunities and challenges of the post conflict window(s) for health systems strengthening with a particular focus on human resources for health and health financing. Important gains have been made across the country in recent years with investment in health staff of all cadres and the roll out of the Free health Care Initiative for
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