In August of this year, when the Ebola outbreak escalated in Liberia and a state of emergency had been declared for the country, Fatu Kekula, a young Liberian nursing student, improvised personal protective equipment (PPE) to care for her father, mother, sister, and cousin.
After three of the relatives survived, her method was featured prominently in the international news media as the “trash bag method”. The reports were meant to ignite a spark of hope in the Ebola epidemic in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia.
The lead for a story on the Ebola outbreak is, by now, familiar: on the 22nd of March, the Guinean Ministry of Health declared an outbreak of Ebola, the first ever in the region.
The virus has since spread through the countryside and across its borders: west to Sierra Leone, south to Liberia, and most recently, north into Senegal. Cases in Lagos and Port Harcourt, Nigeria have put countries across the region and beyond on high alert; as far away as Kenya, public health posters inform people about modes of transmission.
Since the implementation of the mVisa program, refugees overwhelmingly believe malnutrition rates are as high as they have ever been in Gihembe, that the same illnesses abound, but that there is less excrement – or watery diarrhea – visible in the residential quarters.
Their rationale: when there is less food to eat, there is less food to excrete. Refugees are constantly left pondering how to improve themselves, their lives, their health and futures.
In conversations with people living with polio in Hungary, I often encountered members of the tight-knit community referring to themselves as “dinosaurs”.
We are a breed that is about to die out, they said. Nobody gets polio anymore, some added, and they were right – epidemics, even sporadic wild polio cases disappeared from the country in the 1960s.
“Untimely ends” can then be best approached as transformative topoi between the symbolic order of really existing epidemics and the pandemic imaginary, as a vision of the (biological and ontological) end of humanity.
Rather than just bridging experience and anticipation, they create the conditions of possibility of transference between the thinkable and the unthinkable.
In late August 2011, on the eve of the tenth anniversary of 9/11, Hurricane Irene tore northwards up the Atlantic, its projected path fixed over the U.S. East Coast. So great was the force of the tropical storm’s anticipation that flood-prone and low-lying metropolitan areas from Virginia Beach to Providence were preemptively evacuated.
New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, in what would later be dismissed by some as an overblown display of preparedness, closed the New York City transit system, shut off water and electricity in lower Manhattan, and preemptively deployed the National Guard.
Far away from the frontlines of the Ebola outbreaks in Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia, where people and their caretakers die from the disease, new forms of humanitarian aid and global health financing are being leveraged behind closed doors.
In Washington, D.C., London, and Geneva, long-standing government-to-government models of global cooperation and international development assistance, imperfect as they are, are being supplanted by new forms of finance that prioritize profits for private shareholders.
In this article, I share a 10-point list of actions that anthropologists could take, right now, to improve the global response to the West African Ebola outbreak. Take notice, global health and national and international biosecurity communities.
There exists an entire discipline of anthropology that is dedicated to connecting the global and the local, to understanding and mapping populations in crisis, and serve as interlocutors between international institutions and local populations in this region.
Cheikh Ibrahima Niang, a professor of medical and social anthropology at the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Senegal, has researched anthropological aspects of a wide range of health issues.
In July 2014, WHO asked him to investigate community attitudes to Ebola virus disease. He led a team of anthropologists to Sierra Leone just as the outbreak exploded in the eastern part of that country. This is what he found.
Ebola virus control teams need a mix of expertise, including epidemiologists, logistics specialists, laboratory workers, hygiene experts and various other specialized professions.
Social anthropologists play a less well-known but equally important role.
‘Stigma’ is an umbrella term for the direct and indirect consequences of a number of processes that brand someone as different in ways that result in discrimination, loss of status and social exclusion. It can be short-term or evolve into a long-term and life-long issue. Who and how people are being socially labelled – plus the material, political, social and moral consequences of this labelling – often change rapidly throughout the course of an epidemic, particularly from the early stages of an emerging outbreak to an established epidemic.
The first step to addressing or seeking to avoid exacerbating stigma is to identify the nature of, and factors influencing, relationships between those associated with Ebola and the rest of society. Every policy decision should be made with consideration for its immediate and long term consequences for each social group affected. Efforts to de-stigmatise Ebola should focus on improving the social visibility and the physical,
This paper by Anoko J. N., reports on the success of a communication programme among 26 rebellious villages in Forest Guinea during fieldwork in June-July 2014.
