People in affected communities were understandably fearful; some were distrustful of health workers and resisted going to treatment centers, where it may have seemed they were only going to die. There is, after all, no cure for Ebola. Experimental treatments helped some, but not enough. Health workers, harried and overworked trying to keep people alive, may not have had the time to assuage patients’ fears. And those who tried to care for their loved ones themselves often got infected, too. The virus forces people into isolation, spread as it is through contact with bodily fluids, and to hug a sick family member is to put oneself at risk.
While some in the Western media criticized West Africans’ fear of health workers and resistance to public-health measures, the United States got a small taste of Ebola panic when Thomas Eric Duncan became the first case diagnosed in the country in September, followed by three other cases this fall. Duncan was the only patient to die in the U.S., and the panic died down quietly.
Poverty isn’t a problem that only affects the people who shoulder its burdens. If we trace a line back to the beginning of the Ebola crisis, it’s clear that the feeling of isolation and neglect that people in West Africa live with had much to do with why the disease spread so fast. Few people were willing to believe the warnings of a world that they saw as, at best, unconcerned with and, at worst, actively exploitative towards them. If this strain of Ebola had been more contagious, we could be looking at a global plague right now. We need to do a better job of ensuring that people in places like West Africa see the outside world as partners so that during moments like last summer there’s shared trust and genuine communication across cultural lines. That starts by actively seeking out the views of community members and civil-society actors in countries like Liberia before problems such as Ebola come up, and then trying to respond to their concerns.
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Read full, original article: Lessons From an Outbreak: How Ebola Shaped 2014
