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Evidence Reviews
Guide to Community Engagement in WASH: A Practitioner’s Guide, Based on Lessons from Ebola
The Ebola response in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea demonstrated that community engagement is critical in responding to epidemics. This was not always a guiding principle in the fight against Ebola, which initially prioritized biomedical and militarized responses. Working in…
Briefings
Ebola in West Africa Guinea: Resistance to the Ebola Response
Resistance to the Ebola response has been more widespread and more severe in Guinea, than in Liberia and Sierra Leone, with sometimes violent incidents. This is due to a complex interaction of many factors, including underlying causes and the nature…
Evidence Reviews
Ebola Regional Lesson Learning
The Ebola outbreak currently affecting West Africa is the most serious trans-national medical emergency in modern times. It has the potential to become a global health crisis. Many of the countries affected already have weak health systems, which are now…
Evidence Reviews
Ebola – Traditional Healers, Witch Doctors, Burial Attendants
This helpdesk focuses on the impact of traditional healers, witch doctors and burial attendants on ebola in West Africa. It seeks to establish if there is a difference between witch doctors, herbalists and traditional healers in terms of when people…
Evidence Reviews
Ebola- Local Beliefs and Behaviour Change
The Ebola epidemic ravaging parts of West Africa is the most severe acute public health emergency seen in modern times. Never before in recorded history has a biosafety level four pathogen infected so many people so quickly, over such a…
Briefings
Seven Things We Can Learn from the Ebola Epidemic in Uganda in 2000 – 2001
Diseases such as Ebola highlight the importance of a holistic focus on health systems, as opposed to assuming that health is the preserve and concern of health professionals alone. This was the lesson Uganda learnt very quickly in managing the…
Briefings
Rebuilding After Catastrophe? A Missed Opportunity for Health and Social Change
Ebola is just one of the many crises the world faced through 2015, which also saw the Nepal earthquakes, Yemen civil war, South Sudan conflict and the Syrian refugee crisis to name but a few. So, what have we learnt?…
Foresight Papers
IDSR as a Platform for Implementing IHR in African Countries
Of the 46 countries in the World Health Organization (WHO) African region (AFRO), 43 are implementing Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response (IDSR) guidelines to improve their abilities to detect, confirm, and respond to high priority communicable and non-communicable diseases. IDSR…
Evidence Reviews
Ebola: What Lessons for the International Health Regulations?
With more than 3000 deaths since the first case was confirmed in March, 2014, the international community has recognised Ebola as a public health emergency of international concern and a clear threat to global health security. It is the subject…
Briefings
Two Evaluations of Community Ebola Interventions, Two Different Results
This spring, when the team from the Ebola Response Anthropology Platform evaluated Community-Based Ebola Care Centres (CCCs) in Sierra Leone, one thing they constantly heard complaints about was human-resource management. Residents of the communities where the Centres were located grumbled about favouritism: well-paying jobs…
Briefings
Return of the Rebel: Legacies of War and Reconstruction in West Africa’s Ebola Epidemic
The spread of Ebola in West Africa centres on a region with a shared recent history of transnational civil war and internationally led post-conflict reconstruction efforts. This legacy of conflict and shortcomings in the reconstruction efforts are key to understanding…
Briefings
Ebola, Politics and Ecology: Beyond the ‘Outbreak Narrative’
The origin of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa has been traced to the likely confluence of a virus, a bat, a two-year-old child and an under equipped rural health centre. Understanding how these factors may have combined in south-eastern…
