Ebola has reappeared in Guinea since early 2021. 23 cases, including five deaths, have been reported in the Nzérékoré region, in the south of the country. In this forest of Guinea near the borders of Liberia and Côte d’Ivoire, the village of Kpaghalaye is resisting the intervention of the “response”, the team responsible for fighting the epidemic. They have not been able to return there since the beginning of the month. Older women oppose it.
They wear the loincloth where they traditionally initiate young girls, which is meant to give respect. Since the beginning of the month, the elderly women in Kpaghalaye have blocked the entrance to the village for medical teams, who are responsible for identifying cases of Ebola and vaccinating the population.
Anthropologist Frédéric Le Marcis has been installed a few kilometers away to help the Guinea’s Infectious Disease Research and Education Center: Anthropologist Frédéric Le Marcis believes the traumas linked to the previous epidemic are still in people’s minds: “We must remember that 70% during Ebola in the first epidemic of people treated in treatment centers died. And this situation, which was related to the lack of effective treatment, then aroused a feeling of fear and anxiety in the population, which in fact assumed the therapeutic response to a disguised desire to exterminate the population. “
Mutual mistrust
“In addition, in the same region where the epidemic is taking place today, the village of Womey is where in 2014 a delegation that came to do preventive was murdered, cut into pieces and thrown on the toilet. In the village,” he recalls. Frédéric Le Marcis. This event remained the core of the population’s memory and response.
Mutual mistrust explains La Riposte’s communication errors. When the first case of Ebola occurred in Kpaghalaye, the person was taken to the Epidemic Treatment Center (CT-Epi) without informing the other villagers, who today refuse to intervene, including vaccination. Which does not mean, the anthropologist believes, that this resistance will last forever.
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