In light of the Ebola outbreak that spiked last summer, Professor Mary Moran and more than 20 other anthropologists recently met with policy makers in Washington, D.C., to advise organizations assisting with containment efforts.
Moran helped organize the conference, titled Ebola Emergency Response Initiative: Discussion and Preliminary Findings of Anthropological Experts Workshop, which was held at George Washington University Nov. 6–7. It was sponsored by the American Anthropological Association.
In addition, Moran facilitated two sessions, one on health communications, and another focused on attending the dead. Other sessions included care of the sick, clinical trials, and interventions. The conference concluded with a public forum regarding anthropology collaboration on Ebola.
Representatives from the UN Mission for Emergency Ebola Response, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the World Health Organization attended to provide information on their efforts in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. Due to their lack of regional expertise, these organizations have requested the assistance of anthropologists like Moran, in need of their knowledge and research on the region.
“For one of the first times that I’m aware of, we’ve got experts on this region advising an ongoing intervention,” Moran said. “It’s pretty unprecedented because the practitioners on the ground have not always believed that they needed regional expertise in responding to an emergency.”
Conference participants met in working groups to address questions and topics on which policy makers asked for guidance. The results from those working groups were compiled into recommendations for actionable steps.
“Anthropologists and other scholars of the region are saying that this is not just a medical issue,” explained Moran. “This virus is transmitted by some of the most human activities that we know of, which include care of sick family members and treatment of the dead. Sadly, it is the most contagious at the late stages of the disease, and from the corpse.”
As a professor of anthropology and Africana and Latin American studies, Moran noted, “I have written lots of scholarly pieces about funerals and no one has ever needed them before. It’s nice to find that all of this work that I’ve been doing for a rather limited audience suddenly has other uses.”