Socio-Cultural Considerations for Vaccine Introduction and Community Engagement
Key considerations and immediate recommendations, particularly for community engagement, in May 2018 for the Ebola outbreak in DRC.
Key considerations and immediate recommendations, particularly for community engagement, in May 2018 for the Ebola outbreak in DRC.
As hurricanes barrel through some of the most impoverished communities in the Western Hemisphere, and as floods ravage Yemen, Sierra Leone, Bangladesh and India, now is the time to rethink and prioritize cholera epidemic prevention and response.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Matthew in 2016, a surge of cholera in Haiti increased the death toll from the disease. Officials in Haiti this week are already urging people to add bleach to their drinking water to prevent the spread of cholera in the aftermath of Irma.
9,000 people died in Haiti’s last cholera outbreak. We must act fast in disaster-affected hotspots to help prevent history repeating itself.
Humanitarian emergencies result in a breakdown of critical health-care services and often make vulnerable communities dependent on external agencies for care. In resource-constrained settings, this may occur against a backdrop of extreme poverty, malnutrition, insecurity, low literacy and poor infrastructure. Under these circumstances, providing food, water and shelter and limiting communicable disease outbreaks become primary concerns. Where effective and safe vaccines are available to mitigate the risk of disease outbreaks, their potential deployment is a key consideration in meeting emergency health needs. Ethical considerations are crucial when deciding on vaccine deployment.
Allocation of vaccines in short supply, target groups, delivery strategies, surveillance and research during acute humanitarian emergencies all involve ethical considerations that often arise from the tension between individual and common good. The authors lay out the ethical issues that policy-makers need to bear in mind when considering the deployment of mass vaccination during humanitarian emergencies,
This paper examines public engagement with routine vaccination delivery, and vaccine trials and related medical research, in The Gambia. Its approach is rooted in social and medical anthropology and ethnographic methods, but combines insights from the sociology of scientific knowledge, and ‘actor-oriented” sociology in development. Current analysis and professional reflection on public engagement with vaccination reflects the concepts and imperatives of health-providing and research institutions. In contrast Gambian parents’ perspectives are couched in very different conceptual and experiential terms, linked to the wider dilemmas of raising infants in a hazardous world. In this context the paper traces parents’ experiences of routine infant welfare clinics and then how they narrate their experiences with two vaccine related studies orchestrated by the Medical Research Council laboratories.
A range of contrasts emerges. Whereas health professionals tend to attribute vaccination acceptance to the acquisition of modern scientific attitudes,