During the 2014 to 2016 Ebola outbreak, Musso, a native of Monrovia, Liberia, contracted the Ebola virus along together with her husband, five sons and a daughter.
Just a few weeks later, six members of his family died. Moses and his youngest son survived. Their lives have never been the identical since. Her husband was the only real breadwinner of the family. Now a widower and single parent, Musso struggles to make ends meet. As she said, “There is no helper except God, no boyfriend, no father, I am father, mother, uncle and brother. In the place we are renting, we don’t even get food to eat.”
Musso is one among many survivors who’ve recovered from the world’s largest Ebola outbreak. The outbreak began as an endemic disease outbreak within the Guinean village of Milando but spread to neighboring Liberia and Sierra Leone.
During the three years, the disease Prone to infection 28,600 people. Approx Of these, 11,000 died while 17,000 survived.
World Health Organization on 9 June 2016 announced The official end of the Ebola epidemic in Liberia.
Compared to the widespread media coverage when the outbreak began, news coverage of its aftermath has been limited. As a result, few people know that Ebola survivors have struggled to hold on with their lives because the end of the epidemic.
These survivors include widows like Musa, orphans who at the moment are homeless, and Thousands of People who at the moment are blind or have everlasting vision problems.
I’m a social demographer who studies health and population trends. My most up-to-date book Life after the pandemic: Ebola survivors and social dimensions of recovery. Documents lots of these experiences. Based on interviews with 250 Ebola survivors in Liberia and Sierra Leone, I sought to know why many survivors live in worse conditions than before the outbreak, and what prevents them from returning to their normal lives.
Understanding these issues is step one toward solving the issues facing Ebola survivors. Learning about their experiences may prevent these problems from developing in future pandemic survivors.
Medical versus social responses to epidemiology
Determining what went unsuitable begins with understanding the difference between the 2 sorts of responses to epidemics.
The first is the medical response, which emphasizes using medical drugs to save lots of lives and look after affected patients.
The second is social response, which addresses issues reminiscent of providing sustainable livelihoods, supporting orphans, and integrating survivors into their communities.
Policymakers prioritized the short-term medical response over the implications of the Ebola outbreak over the long-term social response.
The primary goal of my research is to look at how Ebola survivors are affected by this stress. I used information from interviews and other sources to evaluate how their health, livelihoods, and family lives have modified because the end of the epidemic.
Research provides evidence on the ways during which limited investment in social response negatively affects the lives of survivors.
For example, there aren’t any programs that give them comprehensive access to health care, although lots of them are either blind, have musculoskeletal disorders, neurological conditions, or live with other long-term unintended effects of the virus.
It also describes the poor health experiences of farmers, who can now not access their land, and hunters who can now not see. They are amongst the various survivors who were previously self-employed but have lost their livelihoods.
With limited investment in social response, the stigma of Ebola continues to thrive in local communities. As a result, Ebola survivors’ social interactions are sometimes fraught with fear of those that imagine they’re still infected. These concerns caused business owners to lose customers and contributed to the demise of marriages.
Many survivors now not receive invitations to attend social events reminiscent of weddings and baby naming ceremonies. In some cases, children have even lost playmates after neighbors have banned them from fiddling with Ebola survivors.
Humanitarian organizations played a crucial role in stopping the spread of the disease throughout the epidemic. Some of their policies have had unintended consequences, nonetheless, which have increased the plight of surviving patients. For example, the practice of Burning the belongings of infected patients to prevent further transmission of the virus Economic hardships have increased amongst many survivors.
The burning caused financial loss amongst survivors who kept their savings under their mattresses, lost farming tools, and needed to pay for equipment borrowed from neighbors that was destroyed.
Some of the messages utilized in public health campaigns to forestall the spread of the virus during a pandemic have also had unintended consequences. These campaigns warned the general public. Avoid touching infected people As a solution to prevent transmission of the disease, as there was no cure for Ebola. Since the top of the epidemic, many individuals in local communities have avoided touching survivors. They query how survivors can claim to be freed from Ebola when the general public has been told there is no such thing as a cure for the disease.
Why Ebola Survivors Feel Abandoned
Listening to the stories of the survivors, it became clear that lots of them felt abandoned. Visits by community leaders have stopped. The specialized care they receive from hospitals has been stopped. Many guarantees of political leaders. who claimed they would provide resources to help them recover. remain incomplete. a few of me Funds provided by donors were fraudulently wasted..
Meanwhile, Ebola survivors proceed to suffer from the irreversible damage they suffered a decade ago. These experiences and lack of attention to their social conditions still define their lives.
Policymakers might want to pay equal attention to medical and social issues when responding to future pandemics. This would require sustained investment to enhance the lives of survivors long after the top of the epidemic has been celebrated.