Extracts below. Read online: https://healthpolicy-watch.news/who-calls-for-immediate-ceasefire-to-ena...
==
The World Health Organization’s (WHO) Director General has called for an immediate ceasefire in the eastern DRC to enable officials to address the outbreak of a particularly deadly strain of Ebola, warning that stopping transmission “depends entirely on humanitarian access”.
The DRC’s Ituri province, the heart of the Ebola Bundibugyo virus outbreak, is facing “a catastrophic collision of disease and conflict”, Tedros warned on Wednesday...
“We cannot build community trust or isolate the sick while bombs are falling,” said Tedros. “We urge all warring parties to agree to an immediate ceasefire to contain this outbreak. To allow us safe and sustained access for medical teams.”
==
COMMENT (NPW): In the Ebola outbreak of 2015, WHO wrote a comprehensive analysis (extracts below): https://www.who.int/news-room/spotlight/one-year-into-the-ebola-epidemic...
It would be interesting to read an assessment of the current outbreak and whether lessons were learned,and implemented, after 2015.
==
Several factors, including some that are unique to West Africa, helped the virus stay hidden and elude containment measures.
High-risk behaviours in the three countries have been similar to what has been seen during previous Ebola outbreaks in equatorial Africa, with adherence to ancestral funeral and burial rites singled out as fuelling large explosions of new cases. Medical anthropologists have, however, noted that funeral and burial practices in West Africa are exceptionally high-risk. Data available in August, as reported by Guinea’s Ministry of Health, indicated that 60% of cases in that country could be linked to traditional burial and funeral practices. In November, WHO staff in Sierra Leone estimated that 80% of cases in that country were linked to these practices.
In Liberia and Sierra Leone, where burial rites are reinforced by a number of secret societies, some mourners bathe in or anoint others with rinse water from the washing of corpses. Understudies of socially prominent members of these secret societies have been known to sleep near a highly infectious corpse for several nights, believing that doing so allows the transfer of powers.
Ebola has preyed on another deep-seated cultural trait: compassion. In West Africa, the virus spread through the networks that bind societies together in a culture that stresses compassionate care for the ill and ceremonial care for their bodies if they die. Some doctors are thought to have become infected when they rushed, unprotected, to aid patients who collapsed in waiting rooms or on the grounds outside a hospital...
After the outbreaks began, the high fatality rate encouraged the perception that hospitals were places of contagion and death, further reinforcing the lack of compliance with advice to seek early medical care. Moreover, many treatment facilities, hidden behind high fences and sometimes draped with barbed wire, looked more like prisons than places for health care and healing...
Fear and misperceptions about an unfamiliar disease have been well documented by medical anthropologists, who have also addressed the reasons why many refused to believe that Ebola was real...
Equally unfamiliar were the response measures, like disinfecting houses, setting up barriers and fever checks, and the invasion by foreigners dressed in what looked like spacesuits, who took people to hospitals or barricaded tent-like wards from which few returned...
If hospitals and “Western” medicine offered no treatments, therapies, or cures, families preferred to care for their loved ones at home...
For unknown reasons that may include the stigma that surrounds this disease, the practice of hiding patients in homes continued in some areas, even after abundant treatment beds became available. The great stigma attached to Ebola explains why suspicious deaths are routinely tested for Ebola...
==
HIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of HIFA (Healthcare Information For All), a global health community that brings all stakeholders together around the shared goal of universal access to reliable healthcare information. HIFA has 20,000 members in 180 countries, interacting in four languages and representing all parts of the global evidence ecosystem. HIFA is administered by Global Healthcare Information Network, a UK-based nonprofit in official relations with the World Health Organization. Email: neil@hifa.org