TY - JOUR
T1 - Rethinking resistance
T2 - public health professionals on empathy and ethics in the 2014-2015 Ebola response in Sierra Leone and Liberia
AU - Walker, Alexis
AU - Kennedy, Caitlin
AU - Taylor, Holly
AU - Paul, Amy
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was funded by the Wellcome Trust [13391].
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
PY - 2020/12
Y1 - 2020/12
N2 - Public health professionals may be confronted with unique ethical challenges in outbreak response situations. We conducted interviews with twenty-two public health professionals involved in responses to the 2014–2015 Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone and Liberia to explore how they understood and experienced the ethical challenges involved in this work. The concerns covered in these interviews ranged dramatically, but three themes emerged as unique contributions from a subset of individuals integrally involved with the frontline response, who framed concerns about representation as key ethical issues. These included concerns regarding misrepresentations of West Africans as ‘resistant’ to the epidemic response, failures in material and information resources provided in the response, and representations of ‘rationality’ between responders and publics. Such concerns suggest that perspectives advanced in the critical public health literature in recent decades are circulating amongst public health professionals involved in outbreak response, although discord amongst respondents suggests the need for more deliberate efforts to reframe thinking about resistance, resources, and rationality in future public health outbreak responses.
AB - Public health professionals may be confronted with unique ethical challenges in outbreak response situations. We conducted interviews with twenty-two public health professionals involved in responses to the 2014–2015 Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone and Liberia to explore how they understood and experienced the ethical challenges involved in this work. The concerns covered in these interviews ranged dramatically, but three themes emerged as unique contributions from a subset of individuals integrally involved with the frontline response, who framed concerns about representation as key ethical issues. These included concerns regarding misrepresentations of West Africans as ‘resistant’ to the epidemic response, failures in material and information resources provided in the response, and representations of ‘rationality’ between responders and publics. Such concerns suggest that perspectives advanced in the critical public health literature in recent decades are circulating amongst public health professionals involved in outbreak response, although discord amongst respondents suggests the need for more deliberate efforts to reframe thinking about resistance, resources, and rationality in future public health outbreak responses.
KW - Ebola
KW - Resistance
KW - ethics
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85096082665&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85096082665&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/09581596.2019.1648763
DO - 10.1080/09581596.2019.1648763
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85096082665
SN - 0958-1596
VL - 30
SP - 577
EP - 588
JO - Critical Public Health
JF - Critical Public Health
IS - 5
ER -