Paper short abstract:

This presentation highlights community-based responses to Ebola, community-based understandings of Ebola, and co-morbidity and co-mortality in a context of health systems failure at the height of Monrovia Liberia’s Ebola epidemic in August-October 2014.

Paper long abstract:

Ebola in Monrovia: Lessons Learned and Unlearned

This presentation draws upon interdisciplinary analyses of ethnographic and qualitative fieldwork on community-based responses to Ebola, community-based understandings of Ebola, and co-morbidity and co-mortality in a context of health systems failure at the height of Monrovia Liberia's Ebola epidemic in August-October 2014. Key insights include: the pace of health information dissemination in the context of epidemic outbreak; the complex character and multifaceted engagement of local communities in combatting the epidemic in the absence of external supports; and an examination of how health-seeking behaviors in a context of health systems collapse can be leveraged to facilitate epidemic response. In addition to identifying the critical anthropological lessons learned for epidemiology, epidemic response, and public health outreach in the West African region, this paper offers challenges conventional models of anthropological knowledge production by reconsidering how anthropologists can contribute to global health and humanitarian crises from remote locations.