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    Ebola: How a People's Science Helped End an Epidemic
    Unavailable
    Ebola: How a People's Science Helped End an Epidemic
    Unavailable
    Ebola: How a People's Science Helped End an Epidemic
    Ebook240 pages3 hours

    Ebola: How a People's Science Helped End an Epidemic

    By Paul Richards

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Shortlisted for the Fage and Oliver Prize 2018

    From December 2013, the largest Ebola outbreak in history swept across West Africa, claiming thousands of lives in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. By the middle of 2014, the international community was gripped by hysteria. Experts grimly predicted that millions would be infected within months, and a huge international control effort was mounted to contain the virus. Yet paradoxically, by this point the disease was already going into decline in Africa itself. So why did outside observers get it so wrong?

    Paul Richards draws on his extensive first-hand experience in Sierra Leone to argue that the international community’s panicky response failed to take account of local expertise and common sense. Crucially, Richards shows that the humanitarian response to the disease was most effective in those areas where it supported these initiatives and that it hampered recovery when it ignored or disregarded local knowledge.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherZed Books
    Release dateSep 15, 2016
    ISBN9781783608614
    Unavailable
    Ebola: How a People's Science Helped End an Epidemic
    Author

    Paul Richards

    Paul Richards was born in Brisbane and taught by an education system that ignored the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history of Queensland.As a law student, he wrote and directed in radical amateur theatre, which led to a chance meeting in 1968 with a powerful Nunukul family who educated him in that hidden history of Queensland.Their revelations of the appalling treatment of Indigenous people caused him to engage in a career spanning half a century in the pursuit of their civil rights and land rights. Initially, he assisted the Brisbane Tribal Council, black theatre and the Black Panther Party. That led to an involvement in the foundation of the Aboriginal Legal Service in 1972.In the following years he provided legal advice and representation to Indigenous people throughout Queensland in many aspects of the legal system. The later years of his career involved the pursuit of native title rights, which gave some recognition and rights to the First Nations of Queensland.Retiring in 2015, he then began recording these significant stories of his experience in those battles.

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    Reviews for Ebola

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    • 4/5
      Recommend! A good no-nonsense retelling of the epidemic, based on research, of the lessons learned and the communities involved, and how people coped with what was going on. Manages to steer clear of ghoulish hysteria, while also giving a picture of what it was like to be living with the epidemic all around. Four stars not five because the continuous referrals to Maussian and Durkheimian philosophy is tiresome.