This paper, based on an ethnographic study in southwestern Nigeria, seeks to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of not only the health care access barriers, but the complex geographical, economic, and sociocultural factors that shape how and when people seek care for mpox within the context of urban informal settlements.
This paper explores mpox awareness, knowledge, and experiences among men who have sex with men (MSM) in Lagos, Nigeria, to provides insights to improve Nigeria’s mpox response and inform similar public health efforts in Africa where MSM criminalisation complicates MSM community engagement.
This paper examines community-based surveillance and primary health care as intersecting infrastructures to draw learning from lived experiences of mpox and the response to the mpox outbreak in southwestern Nigeria during 2022-23.
Contextual social, political and livelihood understandings, factors affecting care-seeking and challenges to vaccination rollout were among the on-the-ground realities relating to mpox spread that experts discussed.
This report is for supervisors managing ongoing Ebola outbreaks, or working on preparedness and recovery activities in regions at risk of, or affected by, Ebola epidemics. It is based on rapid and intensive ethnographic field research in Equateur Province, Democratic Republic of Congo, undertaken less than a month after the epidemic was declared over in July 2018. The research comprised 60 separate open-ended, semi-structured interviews with local health workers, government officials and administrators, Ebola survivors and their families, community leaders, and national and international responders.
The overall finding of the report is that an Ebola epidemic, along with the way the response itself is conducted, can have significant social, psychological, economic, and health impacts for the communities involved. By providing a close, qualitative reportage on perceptions of the epidemic and the response in Equateur Province, the report aims to render tangible the social,
Key considerations about the context of North Kivu province including insecurity and local actors.
Key socio-anthropological considerations regarding ‘indigenous communities’.
Key considerations about the context of Équateur Province, including climate, infrastructure and politics.
Why did Ebola response initiatives in the Upper Guinea Forest Region regularly encounter resistance, occasionally violent? Extending existing explanations concerning local and humanitarian “culture” and “structural violence,” and drawing on previous anthropological fieldwork and historical and documentary research, this article argues that Ebola disrupted four intersecting but precarious social accommodations that had hitherto enabled radically different and massively unequal worlds to coexist.
The disease and the humanitarian response unsettled social accommodations that had become established between existing burial practices and hospital medicine, local political structures and external political subjection, mining interests and communities, and those suspected of “sorcery” and those suspicious of them.
Correspondence on continued poor integration of social sciences during global health crises.
Key populations, specifically people who sell sex (PWSS), people who inject drugs (PWID) and lesbian, and gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) people experience significant human rights violations which underpin the continued high HIV incidence in these populations.This rapid assessment of human rights violations in Eastern and Southern Africa focuses on three priority key populations – PWSS, LGBTI (including MSM), and PWID. The report outlines the normative international treaties that establish a basis for a human rights framework for the HIV response, and explores the emerging evidence of how to promote and protect human rights of key populations and potential key entry points.
In its key findings, the report highlights that evidence from Eastern and Southern Africa suggests there is a large gap between state commitments to protection and promotion of human rights, as agreed to under numerous international and regional human rights treaties,
Failings during the early months of the Ebola outbreak caused the epidemic to become an unprecedented health crisis in West Africa. This cannot be repeated.
