Suspected plague outbreak in Madagascar
Suspected cases of plague were detected in Ankazobe municipality, Analamanga region, Madagascar at the end of September and start of October 2023.
Suspected cases of plague were detected in Ankazobe municipality, Analamanga region, Madagascar at the end of September and start of October 2023.
Sociocultural, economic, and political dimensions play a defining part in epidemics and pandemics. Anthropological involvement is increasingly recognised as important, however, integration of social sciences during global health crises remains, for the most part, delayed, inconsistent, and distant from the centre of decision making and resource prioritisation.
This problem is representative of much larger systemic barriers to academic and practitioner coordination in global health, humanitarian aid, and development practice. While anthropological insights on-the-ground can and do inform extraordinary containment and education efforts during medical humanitarian emergencies, they are all too often not scaled up.
The main objective of this document is to provide evidence-based guidance on conducting practical social mobilization and communication for a yellow fever vaccination campaign, either preventive or reactive.
Information is also given on the monitoring and evaluation of communication and social mobilization techniques. These 10 points from field experience will be especially useful for district-level planning.
This comment piece identifies problematic assumptions behind communication and social mobilisation strategies which rely on using biomedicine to correct local logics and concerns and which cast them as misinformation.
The effectiveness of using standardised advice for non-standardised situations is questioned.