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
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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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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
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Viruses that cause haemorrhagic fevers have been popularized by the media as fierce predators that threaten to devastate global populations. Professor Melissa Leach says there is much to learn from combining local and scientific knowledge in dealing with these deadly pathogens.