“… the murders occurred where it all began — in the remote forests of southeast Guinea, where superstition overwhelms education and whispers of Ebola stoke fear and sometimes violence.”
“The increase in violence marks a new dark chapter in the fight against Ebola…”
The information of the article was collected by investigating several news agencies. For example, a team of journalists from the Guardian and health works went to the distant village of Guinea to cross the words about Ebola. From the words of the Guinea village chief, journalists from other news agencies are also known.
The article has reveal the trust issue (crisis) dealing between the local publics and the health department workers on the spread of Ebola (and anyone that assist with the work of spreading the awareness of Ebola). This issue is revealed via the several violence acts happened in the area. These cases are reported with briefs of scenes and relevant data.
In this article, the main agencies been depicted are the local publics and the health centers. From the reports, Guinea medical centers and aid works are the main targets that received violence acts and harassments from the general publics. Whereas the publics have the perception that aid workers such as doctors and nurses are the transporters of the virus within the local communities.
Due to the trust crisis between the groups, public health cannot be improved via the service from the medical centers. General publics are refused to get into contacts with aid workers.
Byron Good, Ph.D., is a professor of Medical Anthropology at Harvard Medical School. His primary area of research is mental illness and how social perceptions evolves around these issues, in terms of both treatment and social acceptance. Dr. Good has several works on these issues, including several that explore the perspective of bio-medicine in non-western medical knowledge, the cultural meaning of mental illness, and patient narrative during illness. His publications including several papers, books, and edited volumes; he is regarded as a major contributor to the field of psychological anthropology.
The article primarily asserts that how a patient narrates or describes their medical history is deeply rooted in their native culture. As such, physicians must be aware of how an individual's medical experiences can be altered based on this. In turn, physicians must recognize the importance of story-telling and anecdotes when receiving information directly from patients. Narratives project the patient's experience and events through their perspective, granting professionals a glimpse into their thought processes and action patterns.
The author, Byron J. Good, is a Harvard professor in the department of global health and social medicine. He is the director of the International Mental Health Training Program, and has significant experience with field research that has led to many publications.
The article’s main argument is that the narration of an illness is founded in the emotional connection it has to the sufferers life, the place from which they view the illness which includes individual and cultural aspects. Furthermore any lack of factual accuracy is an indicator of the social and cultural environment in which the illness presents itself and is revealing as to how it will be perceived and treated.