By Inna Lazareva
UPPSALA, Sweden, Oct 19 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Unsung local heroes who helped defeat the Ebola outbreak in West Africa may hold the key to thwarting deadly epidemics in the future, experts say.
Alongside targeted assistance from abroad, local know-how is also vital in dealing with endemic killer diseases such as malaria, a recent conference in Sweden heard.
And yet the contributions made by communities have been largely overlooked, Sierra Leone-based British anthropologist Paul Richards told the Uppsala Health Summit on tackling infectious diseases this month.
Ex-civil war combatants who had reinvented themselves as motorcycle-taxi drivers in Sierra Leone and Liberia’s rural areas, for example, were among the first responders in the early stages of the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak, which killed more than 11,300 people in West Africa.
They were helping “long before there was an international response and ambulances”, said Richards, a professor at Sierra Leone’s Njala University, whose book “Ebola: How a People’s Science Helped End an Epidemic” was published in September 2016.
Even after international agencies ferried in hundreds of ambulances, the large vehicles could not get to the most remote areas where the virus was ravaging the local population.
The motorcycle-taxi drivers, working as volunteers with international agencies sometimes buying their fuel, provided the “last mile” access to villages, rescuing patients, carrying blood samples and returning with the results, Richards said.
