Inside the cultural struggle to stamp out Ebola

A front-line report from Sierra Leone examines efforts to change hearts and minds in West Africa’s villages.

NATURE   by Erika Check Hayden                                                                             Dec. 17, 2014

Bombali District, Sierra Leone --Since September, the Ebola virus has stalked the villages and towns along the Kamakwie–Makeni Road, a rutted, red-dirt track that serves as the main artery for a string of villages in the western part of Sierra Leone’s Bombali District.

Yeli Sanda, a village just a few kilometres outside the district’s capital city of Makeni, was the first place to be hit. Over the following months, more than 40 people in the settlement of about 700 became infected; 22 died. In November, the virus infected a woman in Tambiama, about 11 km up the road. A friend who visited her acquired the virus and carried it another 1.5 km to the village of Mayata. She and at least five others there have died.

But just a few hundred metres from Yeli Sanda, the village of Yoni has not seen a single case of Ebola. As soon as the village chief learned that Ebola had struck, he forbade his citizens from visiting Yeli Sanda or attending burials of its residents. His swift action has kept the 100 people of Yoni healthy while other communities have been devastated.

Public-health officials and local leaders who have volunteered in the Ebola fight say that Yoni’s experience is instructive: to banish the virus from the Kamakwie–Makeni Road, which runs for 150 km from Sierra Leone’s fourth-largest city to the Guinean border, they will have to convince people to abandon some long-held beliefs and customs.
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http://www.nature.com/news/inside-the-cultural-struggle-to-stamp-out-ebola-1.16570