142nd APHA Annual Meeting and Exposition

Annual Meeting Recordings are now available for purchase

316118
Responding to the Ebola Epidemic in Liberia and Sierra Leone: Myth and Reality

142nd APHA Annual Meeting and Exposition (November 15 - November 19, 2014): http://www.apha.org/events-and-meetings/annual
Monday, November 17, 2014 : 10:42 AM - 10:54 AM

Emmanuel d'Harcourt, MD, MPH , International Rescue Committee (IRC), New York, NY
The current Ebola epidemic in West Africa has been marked, as have past Ebola outbreaks in other parts of Africa, by powerful narratives and images.  One such narrative is that the epidemic’s unprecedented scale is the result of a combination of ignorance, cultural practices, and weak health epidemic surveillance systems.  Another is that stopping the outbreak requires large-scale intervention by foreign medical teams.

Neither of those narratives is supported by the facts of the outbreak and the response in Liberia and Sierra Leone.  The available evidence suggests that lack of trust between communities and the national government, intensified by over a decade of war and a century of poor governance, was the major driver in the spread of the disease.  The evidence also indicates that some communities have been able to curtail the epidemic, with foreign medical teams and other responders playing a supportive role.

These findings have major implications for the international Ebola response.  Restoring trust, and establishing partnerships with communities, rather than massive deployment of foreign medical teams and related logistics, are likely to bring an end to the current epidemic, and prevent future ones.

Learning Areas:

Diversity and culture
Epidemiology
Implementation of health education strategies, interventions and programs
Planning of health education strategies, interventions, and programs
Protection of the public in relation to communicable diseases including prevention or control
Systems thinking models (conceptual and theoretical models), applications related to public health

Learning Objectives:
Explain one major difference between the reality of the Ebola response in West Africa, and its representation in the media.

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I have over 15 years of community-level public health experience, and have directly participated in designing and implementing the IRC’s global Ebola response.
Any relevant financial relationships? No

I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.