by Ida Jooste | Global Health Advisor | Internews
*This post originally appeared in PLOS | blogs. When I was in Liberia in June this year, just one month after the country had been declared “Ebola-free,” I noticed how often I heard the phrase “that was before Ebola” or “that was after Ebola”. The Ebola outbreak that began in 2014 brought unspeakable horror to a country still rebuilding after the war. News of new cases...
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by Kim Martin
The Health Communication Capacity Collaborative (HC3) is supporting the printing and distribution in Liberian schools of a comic book featuring a fictional soccer star that survived Ebola. Plans call for distributing 3,500 copies in schools along with a teacher guide, as well as selling it commercially. Developed by a team of graphic artists and storytellers in Liberia, the Ebola edition of “Tabella Tee – International...
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by Lisa Cobb
The journal Nature has a special on Ebola, collecting all its reporting on the virus in one place. One of those articles, Models overestimate Ebola cases, is on the failure of mathematical models to accurately predict the epidemic’s course. In an interesting letter responding to that article, the authors credit “altered cultural perception” that allowed for behavior change, changing the course of the epidemic for the...
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by Lisa Cobb
Question: What is the difference between these two messages? “Ebola is real! If you get it, you’ll die!” and “Ebola is real! If you seek treatment you have a fifty-per-cent chance of recovery?” Answer: Theory. The Extended Parallel Process Model, or EPPM, to be exact. These messages come from a great article in the New Yorker on the use of “culture makers” (i.e. entertainers, community...
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by Lisa Cobb
In ancient Greece, slaves and traitors and other undesirables were marked or branded to show their lowly status and allow people to shun them. From that practice we get the word stigma, or mark. Today we use the word to describe the discrimination and social shunning people experience for myriad different reasons – sexual orientation, disease status, weight, ethnicity. As Ebola has spread, so has...
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by Lisa Cobb
The question of Ebola communication has focused mainly on, well, Ebola. But beyond knowledge of how the virus is spread and what to do if you get it, there are practices and skills that public health people have been communicating about for decades that can help with prevention and, possibly, survival. Two big ones are hand-washing and Oral Rehydration Therapy (ORT). Hand-washing is one of...
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by Lisa Cobb
If you Google “brochure” and “family planning,” you get page after page of links to brochures, most of them to reputable materials you can use. But replace “family planning” with “Ebola,” and there aren’t so many options. The outbreak, and our response, is simply too new. If you are in need of a brochure (or poster or radio spot or whole communication strategy) for Ebola...
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by Kathryn Bertram | Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs | Program Officer
During a capacity building workshop in Freetown, Sierra Leone, this past June, the mood was understandably tense as Ebola continued to spread from the East. Tea-break conversations became heated about regional responses to it.
