无国界医生组织反思埃博拉疫情
More than a year after the Ebola epidemic began in West Africa the end appears to be near. Liberia has been declared Ebola-free and Guinea and Sierra Leone have reported just a few cases in recent days. Members of the medical aid group that sounded the alarm about the outbreak have reflected on its effects.
Doctors Without Borders said while the number of recorded Ebola cases “has decreased, much work remains to be done.” It described health systems as being “ravaged,” as hundreds of health care workers died in the outbreak along with about 11,000 others.
Some members of the group – also known as MSF – took part in a panel discussion about how Ebola damaged the lives of both the infected and uninfected.
Ella Watson-Stryker, a health promoter, said a lot of lessons have been learned. In the beginning, MSF focused on supporting the overall intervention efforts to stop the spread of Ebola. But she said more needed to be done.
“What we didn’t do well in the beginning is broaden our scope to really be able to reach into the communities – not just the communities that were most affected, but also the communities that were not yet affected. And we stayed very much focused in Guinea in Guékédou Prefecture and we didn’t focus on Guinea as a country, as a whole. And it was months before we had a dedicated health promoter based in Conakry even though we had a lot of cases in Conakry throughout that time -even though we had a fully functioning management center,” she said.
Another lesson learned, she said, is just how scary Ebola can be.
“Ebola is a disease that creates fear and everyone’s afraid – whether it’s the leader of a small village, whether it’s the president of a country. The doctors and nurses who respond are afraid. The health promoters, who are there - trained to talk about Ebola - are afraid. And our patients are terrified. And so, I think that’s the biggest barrier that we have to overcome.”
Watson-Stryker said when people are that afraid they may refuse to face reality.
“Something that we learned again and again is that when people are afraid denial becomes a really good fallback for how to deal with that level of fear. And we s
