Time Of Ebola Research Articles

Psychology and the Threat of Contagion: Feeling Vulnerable to a Disease Moderates the Link Between Xenophobic Thoughts and Support for Ingroup-Protective Actions.

The widespread threat of contagious disease disrupts not only everyday life but also psychological experience. Building on findings regarding xenophobic responses to contagious diseases, this research investigates how perceived vulnerability to a disease moderates the psychological link between people's xenophobic thoughts and support for ingroup-protective actions. Three datasets collected during the time of Ebola (N = 867) and COVID-19 (Ns = 992 and 926) measured perceived disease risk, group-serving biases (i.e., xenophobic thoughts), and support for restrictive travel policies (i.e., ingroup-protective actions). Using correlational and quasi-experimental analyses, results indicated that for people who perceive greater disease risk, the association between group-serving bias and restrictive policy support is weakened. This weakened association occurred because people who felt more vulnerable to these diseases increased support for ingroup-protective actions more strongly than xenophobic thoughts. This research underscores the importance of understanding the impact of threats on psychological processes beyond the impact on psychological outcomes.

Supporting survivors of sexual violence and abuse during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Supporting survivors of sexual violence and abuse during the COVID-19 pandemic.

After COVID-19, a future for the world's children?

After COVID-19, a future for the world's children?

Sequencing in the time of Ebola.

This month’s Genome Watch highlights how next-generation sequencing technologies provide crucial information during disease outbreaks and thus inform the public health response. This month’s Genome Watch highlights how next-generation sequencing technologies provide crucial information during disease outbreaks and thus inform the public health response.

Diaspora mobilization and the politics of loyalty in the time of Ebola: evidence from the Sierra Leonean diaspora in the UK

AbstractFollowing the recent involvement of overseas diasporas and citizen groups in humanitarian crises, scholars are reconsidering how these groups mobilize and what distinguishes them from formal humanitarian organizations. In this article, I document the individual and collective mobilization of a section of the Sierra Leonean diaspora during the 2014/15 Ebola outbreak. I focus on the individual health‐related communications of Sierra Leoneans living in London, on a specific UK‐based diaspora association called the Kono District Development Association‐UK, and on efforts to coordinate the diaspora. Bolten (2012), and Van Hear and Cohen (2017), show that diasporic mobilization operates through ‘nested scales’ of loyalty to kin, association and nation, and that these different loyalties overlap and conflict. I argue that such overlapping engagements challenge policy orientations to ‘national’ diasporas and offer an alternative model of international humanitarianism.

An IDEA Model Analysis of Instructional Risk Communication in the Time of Ebola

The Ebola outbreak and its rapid spread throughout West Africa and other countries was a megacrisis that imposed numerous challenges to those communicating to nonscientific publics about the epidemic. This article examines the instructional risk messages offered in the days that followed the 2014 infection and death of Liberian national Thomas Eric Duncan in Dallas, Texas. More specifically, we apply the IDEA model for effective instructional risk and crisis communication embellished by exemplification theory to conduct a thematic analysis of messages offered locally (Dallas news stories and press releases), nationally (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Live Chat Twitter posts), and internationally (website content from the World Health Organization, the United Nations Children’s Fund, and Doctors Without Borders). Our conclusions reveal that the majority of messages offered from each organization privileged the element of explanation over internalization and action as well as negative over positive exemplification. On the basis of these conclusions, and informed by previous research, we propose a number of potential implications and recommendations for offering a balanced representation among internalization, explanation, and action as proposed in the IDEA model. We also suggest that positive exemplification could be used strategically to motivate receivers to attend to these messages (internalization), reduce potential misunderstandings (explanation), and take appropriate self-protective actions (action). Agency spokespersons and media reporters may find the conclusions and recommendations drawn from this analysis to be useful when crafting similar instructional risk preparedness and crisis response messages.

‘Black’ and ‘white’ death: burials in a time of Ebola in Freetown, Sierra Leone

AbstractThe article examines experiences of the 2014‐15 Ebola crisis in Freetown, Sierra Leone, through an analysis of the performance of burials. While most of the city's residents had no contact with the virus, ‘Ebola’ was inescapable, owing to the onerous state of emergency regulations imposed by national and international authorities. All burials, regardless of the cause of death, were to be performed by newly established official teams operating according to unfamiliar biomedical and bureaucratic protocols. Burials became emblematic of the crisis through presenting a conflict between local practices and novel procedures, which was coded locally in a complex racial language of ‘black’ and ‘white’, recalling a long regional history of violent integration into the Atlantic World. Building on long‐standing anthropological discussion on the relationship between ‘good’ death and social order, the article explores how burials became sites around which opposing ‘orders’ were experienced, negotiated, and reconciled in locally meaningful ways.

Maternal Health Care in the Time of Ebola: A Mixed-Method Exploration of the Impact of the Epidemic on Delivery Services in Monrovia

Public health emergencies like major epidemics in countries with already poor health infrastructure have the potential to set back efforts to reduce maternal deaths globally. The 2014 Ebola crisis in Liberia is claimed to have caused major disruptions to a health system not fully recovered after the country’s civil war, and is an important and relevant case for studying the resilience of health systems during crises. We use data on the utilization of maternal health care services from two representative surveys, one conducted before the outbreak of Ebola, the 2013 Liberian DHS, and another, smaller survey conducted in Monrovia in December 2014, during the height of the epidemic. We focus exclusively on data for women aged 18–49 residing in urban Monrovia, restricting our samples to 1,073 and 763 respondents from the two surveys respectively. We employ a mixed methods approach, combining a multinomial logit model with in-depth semi-structured interviews. Our regression analyses indicate that deliveries in public facilities declined whereas they increased for private facilities. Furthermore, overall facility delivery rates remained stable through the Ebola epidemic: the proportion of home births did not increase. Drawing on insights from extensive qualitative interviews with medical personnel and focus groups with community members conducted in Monrovia in August–September 2015 we attribute these survey findings to a supply side “substitution effect” whereby private clinics provided an important cushion to the shock leading to lower supply of government services. Furthermore, our interviews suggest that government health care workers continued to work in private facilities in their local communities when public facilities were closed. Our findings indicate that resources to shore up healthcare institutions should be directed toward interventions that support private facilities and health personnel working privately in communities during times of crisis so that these facilities are safe alternatives for women during crisis.

From the Front Lines: Trialing Research Ethics in the Time of Ebola

From the Front Lines: Trialing Research Ethics in the Time of Ebola

Health Communication in the Time of Ebola: A Culture-Centered Interrogation

This brief essay is a commentary on how critical health communication theory can contribute to an understanding of the cultural dynamics of infectious disease pandemics. In particular, we focus on a specific trajectory of health communication theorizing—the culture-centered approach—and its heuristic and pragmatic utility in enhancing knowledge about public health crises like infectious disease outbreaks. In the backdrop of the mobilizations against the 2014 Ebola virus disease epidemic in the 3 West African nations of Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, indigenous cultural practices were construed as pathogenic and local agency of affected communities disregarded, even as the global risks of the epidemic were highlighted. In contrast to this interventionist notion of culture, the culture-centered approach offers a heuristic rubric through which to scrutinize the dialectical interrelationship between indigenous cultural practices, structural determinants of health, and the everyday agency of individuals of affected communities. We argue that such a listening-based paradigm of communication theorizing is instrumental in developing authentic, ethical, and effective health communication practice in public health crises.

Implications of Changing Attitudes towards Game Meat Consumption at the Time of Ebola in Limbe, Cameroon

In this article, we examine social responses to the 2014–2016 Ebola epidemic in Cameroon, a country near to but beyond the farthest reaches of known Ebola cases. As Ebola spread in West Africa, there was mounting anxiety that the epidemic would spill over the border with Nigeria. To investigate people's responses to Ebola-fear, we interviewed a sample of fifty people living in Limbe, near the Nigerian border. We found a pattern of response that involved information-seeking, the adoption of various behavioral strategies believed to protect people from infection, and the spread of messages about Ebola prevention by word of mouth and through social media. Informed by resilience theory and recognition of the emergent nature of culture, we argue that by studying people's emotional, behavioral, and social reactions to perceived health threats, medical anthropologists can contribute to efforts to develop useful intervention in a world of enhanced infectious disease epidemic risk.

The integral role of the Community Health Worker in reconnecting HIV, TB, and Leprosy patients with care and treatment in a health system ravaged by and abandoned in the time of Ebola: An example from Liberia

The integral role of the Community Health Worker in reconnecting HIV, TB, and Leprosy patients with care and treatment in a health system ravaged by and abandoned in the time of Ebola: An example from Liberia

Love in a time of Ebola: reflections on theology of medicine in resource-challenged environments

This paper presents a much needed (philosophical and) theological framework for the practice of Christian medicine in resource-challenged environments. While “health and healing” are often seen as determining the nature and goals of medicine, I believe that this distorts our understanding and practice of medicine. Rather, medicine is about care: it is an expression of a community’s solidarity with people whose inherent vulnerability and finitude is exposed by the physical or psychological disruptions occasioned by disease, disability, or disaster; it aims to so care for them that their inherent worth as members of the human community is affirmed and that they are able to function well in community, where possible, and to the best of our ability in the circumstances in which we find ourselves. This both requires costly service in contexts of scarcity and informs the kind of care that ought to be provided to those in need.

Cancer in a time of Ebola.

Yes, you have breast cancer. The tests clearly show it. Your chart indicates that after your practitioner discovered the lump, a mammogram and then an ultrasound-guided core biopsy suggested an invasive ductal carcinoma, and surgery was recommended. As best as I can tell, you stopped there. You

On Plague in a Time of Ebola

Ebola and plague share several characteristics, even though the second and third plague epidemics dwarfed the 2014-15 Ebola outbreak in terms of mortality. This essay reviews the mortality due to the two diseases and their lethality; the spatial and socioeconomic dimensions of plague mortality; the role of public action in containing the two diseases; and their economic impact.

Surgery in the time of Ebola: how events impacted on a single surgical institution in Sierra Leone

IntroductionThe mortality and morbidity of Ebola extends far wider than those contracting the disease. Surgical activity in Sierra Leone has been severely disrupted by the epidemic.MethodThis is a retrospective study...

Obstetrics in the Time of Ebola

Obstetrics in the Time of Ebola

Tuberculosis in the time of Ebola: obstacles and opportunities

Tuberculosis in the time of Ebola: obstacles and opportunities

US aid in the time of Ebola -- Liberia and Nigeria

US aid in the time of Ebola -- Liberia and Nigeria

Morality in a time of Ebola

Morality in a time of Ebola