Emergency initiative on the Ebola outbreaks – panel 1: video

The American Anthropological Association / World Council of Anthropological Associations/ Wenner-Gren Foundation Emergency Initiative on the Ebola Outbreak, is bringing together anthropologists from around the world with expertise in Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Nigeria, other Ebola-affected regions, and in infectious disease management for a workshop to address critical issues in the current Ebola outbreak. The workshop will generate a series of short briefing papers that provide actionable guidance to real-time actors in the field for how to proceed with technical, political, social, and economic Continue reading →

On gloves, rubber and the spatio-temporal logics of global health

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 Continue reading →

Deforestation and the rise of industrial-scale farming in Africa could lie behind Ebola outbreak

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 Continue reading →

Ebola teams need better cultural understanding, anthropologists say

A defining feature of this Ebola epidemic has been the significant resistance of some of the affected communities to treatment and prevention measures by foreign aid workers and their own governments. Many local people, suspicious and fearful, have refused to go to treatment centers or turn over bodies for safe burial, and whole communities have prohibited the entry of doctors and health teams. As the months have gone by that resistance has been less reported upon, and there are signs that it may be lessening. Continue reading →

The significance of death, funerals and the after-life in Ebola-hit Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia: Anthropological insights into infection and social resistance

The aim of this briefing paper is to consider the various ways in which widely reported fear and resistance to the Ebola response can be understood, and what each way of understanding offers to those battling with the current epidemic. As far as this paper is concerned, there is no single ‘right way’ to comprehend resistance to educators, medics and burial teams, as this is a very complex social phenomenon. The aim instead is to outline the variety of ways in which resistance can be Continue reading →