As of March 2020, the Ebola outbreak in North Kivu and Ituri in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) had claimed more than 2,200 lives. Women and girls make up 56% of the almost 3,500 confirmed cases. Stopping transmission of the virus has been the primary focus for the Ministry of Health and responding agencies,… Read more »
Country: Democratic Republic of The Congo
Community engagement: the key to successful Ebola research
Community engagement is a process of developing relationships that enable stakeholders to work together to address healthrelated issues and promote well-being. Ideally, it should draw on locally contextualised meanings derived from experiences and lessons learnt during the implementation of community engagement activities. These activities include informationsharing with stakeholders and getting feedback, deliberate steps to close… Read more »
What do adaptations tell us about the production of trust? Shifting the ‘burden of change’ from people to the response
This article, based on our research project on ‘Humanizing the design of the Ebola response in Eastern DRC’, examines the role of adaptation in the production of trust. The project has been chiefly concerned with exploring how humanely designed care and treatment for Ebola contribute to the formation of trust. In past epidemics, the need… Read more »
Replacing the language of fear: language and communication in DRC’s latest Ebola response
We know that effective communication with communities at risk is essential to containing disease outbreaks. Yet people in the latest Ebola response in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) can’t always access the information they need. Even if they can access it, they can’t always understand it. And even if they understand it, they don’t… Read more »
Grief and memorialisation: making meaning with Ebola-affected families
In order to prevent the spread of Ebola through the handling of dead bodies, burials are carried out by special teams who are trained to do this in a safe and dignified manner. This should be standard practice by response teams, and has been implemented in the North Kivu outbreak. A medically safe burial involves… Read more »
Lessons not learnt? Faith leaders and faith-based organisations in the DRC Ebola response
The response team did not understand how we live here. They arrived in villages in biohazard suits, looking like members of armed groups and frightening the population. Without explanation, they would demand to take the patient away…The team did not build a dialogue, taking into account local cultural values. In Butembo, the rumours were that… Read more »
Community first: the key to stopping the Ebola epidemic
The tenth Ebola outbreak in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) was declared in August 2018. Nineteen months later, it has resulted in over 3,400 confirmed and probable cases and more than 2,200 deaths. By October 2019, the head of the Ebola response, Dr. Jean-Jacques Muyembe, and the Congolese government in Kinshasa were predicting that… Read more »
Reducing mortality from Ebola through a comprehensive, decentralised and integrated standard of care
Since 2014, ALIMA has been involved in the management of several Ebola outbreaks. Despite the implementation in North Kivu and Ituri of recommendations derived from analysis of previous episodes, there has been no significant improvement in case fatality rates. In Guinea between 2014 and 2016, for example, the case fatality rate was 66.7%, while in… Read more »
Ebola and innovation: examining the approach to the Nord Kivu epidemic
Within four months of the first notification of Ebola cases in August 2018, the Nord Kivu (and Ituri) Ebola epidemic had become the second-largest on record. Notwithstanding a rapid and massive mobilisation of resources, the outbreak continued beyond the most pessimistic predictions and the case fatality rate (the proportion of people with the infection who… Read more »