Ebola is spreading like wildfire in the Democratic Public of the Congo where many people are refusing to get vaccinated against the disease out of fear and superstition.
In some cases, even the sick are turning away treatment as distrust of Western medicine runs deep in Congolese culture.
“As you can imagine, there’s a long history of outsiders manipulating and taking advantage of local people, so there’s generally some mistrust in terms of colonial history,” says Dr Barry Hewlett, professor of anthropology at Washington State University in Vancouver.
Though this wariness is not necessarily specific to medicine itself, Dr Hewlett, who studies the anthropology of infectious diseases and was the first such scholar to be involved in an Ebola outbreak response, says “any international health worker should assume that most people are not going to trust the service they’re providing….
“So much of outbreak control is behavioral and social, so we need behavioral and social scientists in there to work with the biomedical folks because local communities have to be behind [the response] and understand it on their own terms if control efforts are going to be effective.”