Resources

Power, fairness and trust : understanding and engaging with vaccine trial participants and communities in the setting up the EVOVAC-Salone vaccine trial in Sierra Leone

In this article the authors discuss the implementation of an Ebola vaccine trial in Kambia district in Sierra Leone during and after the epidemic. They analyze the role of social science research for the development of community engagement strategies. The authors give special attention to the analysis of rumours as source of information and explanation about resistance rooted in a much deeper sociopolitical context.

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Improving burial practices and cemetery management during an Ebola virus disease epidemic — Sierra Leone, 2014

This piece is a summary of an assessment conducted in Sierra Leone on the acceptability of safe, nontraditional burial practices and cemetery management during the Ebola Outbreak. Both measures aimed the control of the virus transmission. Some of the findings were: scarce burial teams, miscoordination among Ebola response bodies, lack of systematic procedures for testing and reporting results on dead bodies from Laboratories, inadequate cementerie space, no acceptance of safe burial practices by communities. These finding informed a standard operating procedure (SOP) for safe, dignified medical burials.

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Rat-Atouille: A mixed method study to characterize rodent hunting and consumption in the context of Lassa fever

This paper investigated the consumption of rodents, including the reservoir species of Lassa fever, and found this is widespread and does not neatly tally against generational or gender lines. Further, it found that the reasons for rodent consumption are multifactorial, including taste preferences, food security, and opportunistic behaviour.

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Land tenure in Sierra Leone: the law, dualism, and the making of a land policy

This book gives a brief account of the background to the dual land tenure system in force in Sierra Leone and explains the reasons why the dualism derived from the different colonial experience of the former Colony and Protectorate of Sierra Leone still persists. It also gives an account of the main features of the English derived land law in the Western Area and of the forms of land holding in the Provinces which are governed predominately by customary law.

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