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epidemic

Covid-19
Media Relay

“No population in the world stands to attention like that in 2-3 days”

Confronted with a "totally unprecedented biological, social and political event", Jean-Hervé Bradol spoke with Mediapart about the difficulties of basing all prevention on behavioural measures: "It takes time for a society to fully acknowledge the existence of the event, which is unfolding as it tries to understand it.”

Sanitation activities in urban slum, Haiti
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About "Choléra, Haïti, 2010-2018, Histoire d’un désastre" by Renaud Piarroux

The cholera outbreak in Haiti in October 2010 was among the deadliest in modern history, with 800,000 people infected and 10,000 fatalities. And these are just the official figures. The actual death toll was far higher, as evidenced by numerous retrospective mortality surveys, and can only be expressed as an order of magnitude: to wit, several tens of thousands.   
This book recounts eight years of struggle on two fronts that the author shows to be closely linked: the field, with the implementation of measures of prevention and case management; the scientific debate, in the form of a shattering of the dominant environmental theory concerning the origin of the epidemic.

Ebola outbreak - Bunia
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Ebola outbreak: a failure in social mobilisation

On August 1st 2018, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s health authorities declared the country’s tenth outbreak of Ebola virus disease (EVD), this time in North Kivu province.  Just over a year later, this outbreak is still ongoing, with several dozen new cases reported each week. In the space of 12 months, 3000 people contracted the disease and 2000 of them have since died. This latest outbreak can be seen as a failure at two levels: first, it is already the second biggest EVE outbreak ever recorded, and second, two out of three patients have died. What are the reasons for this failure? What operational strategies should we develop in response? 
Interview with Jean-Hervé Bradol, Director of studies at CRASH, by Elba Rahmouni.

Ebola response in Mangina
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Ebola in the DRC: between operational trial and error and scientific uncertainty

Rebecca Grais, Research Director at Epicentre, MSF’s epidemiology arm, and Pierre Mendiharat, Deputy Director of Operations for MSF-France, offer their insights on the Ebola outbreak in North Kivu Province in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). This joint interview in four parts (the outbreak, social context, treatments, and vaccination) aims to show how science and practice interact around each outbreak.

Le centre médical d'Ebola à FreeTown en Sierra Leone
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The response to the Ebola epidemic: negligence, improvisation and authoritarianism

If MSF has held a preponderant position in the response to the Ebola crisis, it owes it just as much to its intervention capacities as to its capacity for criticism. The following article by Jean-Hervé Bradol embodies perfectly the latter in pointing to the issues that appeared on the occasion of this epidemic.