By Crispina Cummings
In a meeting with community leaders on November 4 in Freetown President Ernest Bai Koroma blamed Ebola on attitudes and behaviours, saying “people are still in denial and are burying dead people at night.”
He said people’s attitudes needed to change for the country to contain the Ebola disease, adding that attitudinal problems were the biggest challenges facing the fight against the scourge.
Also, in his first two press briefings in Freetown, CEO of the National Ebola Response centre that coordinates the Ebola fight, Rtd Major Paolo Conteh, stressed that the “cultural practices of Sierra Leoneans have to change” for the disease to be controlled. He confirmed that attitudinal problems were among the biggest challenges for them because “people are still touching sick people and are going to burials.” He said if people did not change their attitudes “those helping us will one day get fed up and leave us.”
Jeffery Marcathy, Programme Manager of PREACON Food Management, a Dutch consultancy firm, said “Some people’s attitudes towards Ebola are very lackadaisical” and that people were not doing enough to help contain the disease. He said that persistent denial and traditional beliefs were the major factors quickening the spread of the virus in the country, adding that sensitisation about Ebola had gone far and wide in the country.
Marcathy said it was now the responsibility of people to change their attitudes, but people in Freetown and other worst hit places were resigning to faith “saying Ebola deaths are results of witchcraft and curses.”
“If these mindsets are not changed it is a very difficult war we are fighting, and all should be very vigilant to fight this war and win it in the shortest possible time.”
He said their organisation had urged government to introduce mechanisms that positively affect attitudinal change in the area of hand washing and other preventive measures.
In response, Dr Ivan Ajibola Thomas who heads the Attitudinal and Behavioural Change, ABC secretariat in the country, said the negative attitudes of people in the Ebola fight were linked to a huge amount of emotionality.
“It is absolutely difficult to neglect your relative when they are sick, because you would be confused as to whether it is Ebola or malaria that they are suffering from. That would move you to at least touch them,” Dr Thomas said, adding that Ebola was thriving also because of “indiscipline and the weakness of the security network.”
He said people were leaving quarantined homes “to go to work, to find food, boy and girl friends,” because houses were being isolated without food.
“Sometimes it is only on the twenty-third day that quarantined homes get food,” said Thomas, adding that despite those difficulties they were working, but “if the work of ABC is not backed up by law enforcement it will not succeed.”
He said despite government had not called them on board in the fight, they had done some cross-cutting engagements with institutions like ministries of health, youth and aviation to do sensitisation on Ebola around the country.
The executive coordinator said they had just come from a survey at quarantined homes around the country where they supplied food, and they also had paid-for programmes at the national broadcaster, SLBC, to sensitise people on attitudinal change.
© Politico 07/11/14
