Key Findings
There are four particular narratives about haemorrhagic fevers: the iconic outbreak narrative that treats haemorrhagic fevers as an emerging global threat. A second narrative that casts the problem in terms of deadly local disease events requiring the mobilization of rapid containment and public health measures. A third narrative that argues that local knowledge and socio-cultural practices are crucial to understanding and responding to haemorrhagic fevers. And a fourth which turns attention to longer-term interactions between social and environmental processes involved with disease patterns and vulnerabilities.
Particular actors and institutions promote and adhere to these different narratives drawing on different forms of knowledge and ‘cultural models’ (beliefs, assumptions, understandings of nature & aetiology of a disease) of disease to do so.
Recommendations
Each of these narratives construct haemorrhagic fevers in different ways. Elements of these must therefore contribute to the task of addressing haemorrhagic fevers, underlining the need for further elaboration of the understandings and strategy implied by each. Including insights from long-standing work on cultural ecology and ethno-ecology, and placing a concern with local framings more firmly within the emerging fields of ecohealth, may help generate more inclusive, acceptable and robust approaches to dealing with haemorrhagic fevers.
