The first mile: community experience of outbreak control during an Ebola outbreak in Luwero District, Uganda

Authors: Daniel H. de Vries,corresponding author Jude T. Rwemisisi, Laban K. Musinguzi, Turinawe E. Benoni, Denis Muhangi, Marije de Groot, David Kaawa-Mafigiri, and Robert Pool

In 2012, Uganda implemented an Ebola outbreak control initiative using community health workers and social mobilization approaches to curb the outbreak. This ethnographic study assessed community perspectives of the ebola control initiative. It found skepticism and distrust among community members about biomedical explanations for Ebola and about community health workers, who community members saw as members of the village leadership selected so they could get allowances. The authors underscore the need for health systems managers to take local cultural understandings of both disease and the biomedical health system into consideration to design more effective disease control interventions.