CABI Blogs: hand picked... and carefully sorted

World Tourism Day: Tourism and Community Development

World Tourism Day (WTD), celebrated every year on 27 September, is a global observance to highlight tourism’s social, cultural, political and economic value. 

WTD 2014 is being held under the theme Tourism and Community Development - focusing on the ability of tourism to empower people and provide them with skills to achieve change in their local communities. This focus is in line with the global transition to the Sustainable Development Goals as the guiding principle promoted by the UN from 2015 and beyond. 

Accurate and timely communication is key to stopping transmission of Ebola

Ebolavirus: coverpage for CABI's print journal Tropical Diseases Bulletin

Ebola brings out the worst and the best in mankind.

Global coverage of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa began with (the best) courageous foreign health care workers (HCWs) being flown home by their governments in a desperate attempt to save their lives, and rapidly moved on to the sheer panic amongst the local populations experiencing the outbreak: riots, health care workers and government officials abandoning their posts (the worst). Somewhere imbetween mention was made, usually by the foreign HCWS, of their local colleagues left behind who struggled on without resources and personal protection (the best).

Medicin Sans Frontiers highlighted the slow response of the international community.

Misinformation, public panic and stigma

Ebola haemorrhagic fever (caused by different ebola virus strains) has been around since 1976, with regular self-limiting outbreaks, usually in remote areas of one country. Index cases always involve some contact with animal reservoirs (bushmeat (wild animal meat), bats, rodents, monkeys), and its then spread by person-to-person transmission through contact with bodily secretions or with objects contaminated with secretions. It’s infamous for its high case-fatality rate and the ease with which it spreads among contacts of the diseased.

What makes this time different is the Zaire strain has now reached West Africa: there  it has spread from remote regions into highly populated urban areas, and it has crossed borders so that there are escalating outbreaks in 3 adjacent countries (Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia), with no end in sight. The epidemic (for that is what it is now), has resulted from sustained person-to-person transmission.

Cases have also been reported in Nigeria and Senegal but these countries seem to have contained the transmission of the virus. DR Congo  has an outbreak.   An up-to-date Ebola Healthmap can be found here.

Ignorance and fear, drivers of disease

Misinformation among health workers and the public fuelled panic and contributed to the spread of Ebola-zaire over the last 6 months.  HCWs abandoned their posts or were the source of rumours that created riots, government officials got out whilst they could. [The index case for Nigeria, was an official who left Liberia, who knowingly had had contact with an Ebola victim].

Fear has not just caused civil breakdown.  It is masking the magnitude of the outbreak, especially in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Families fear stigma so hide sick relatives or consider the hospitals as death sentences (breaking relatives out!) or indeed consider them the cause of the illness in the first place. Cases being cared for outside hospitals do not enter the statistics.   

Unlike the “Black Death” in medieval Europe, it’s not lack of real clinical knowledge that’s the problem but:

1. Weak health systems, lacking skilled HCWs and resources
2. Lack of knowledge amongst the general public
3. Lack of community involvement & mistrust of government
4. Misinformation among health workers, ministries of health and the public
5. Lack of effective drugs and vaccines…supportive therapy only is current medical response.

The Cost of Pakistan’s Floods

IPCC Highlights Urgent Need for Greater Political Will Over Climate Change Readiness

The last 2 weeks have seen the worst floods in Kashmir for almost 50 years. In Pakistan alone, more than 250 people have died and hundreds of thousands have been displaced. The waters currently extend well into the country’s most populous province, Punjab and are due to effect more southern areas in Sindh and Balochistan, very soon. Climate change scenarios predict events like this will be increasingly common, especially in South Asia, where already, there is evidence that the annual monsoon has become much less predictable than in the past. A combination of Pakistan’s agricultural economy, reliance on river-bodies for irrigation and its high number of poor, rural communities, make it particularly vulnerable to the effects of flooding, predicted to become more common under future climate change scenarios.  According to an expert panel convened last month in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, a combination of lack of political will, poor governance and degradation of natural resources is to blame for the countries current lack of climate change readiness.

World Water Monitoring Day 2014

World Water Monitoring Day (WWMD) is observed each year on September 18.  It was initially chosen to coincide with the anniversary of the US Clean Water Act on October 18, but was changed to encourage participation in regions of the world where temperatures reach freezing point at that time of the year.  WWMD was established in 2003 by America’s Clean Water Foundation as a global educational outreach program with an aim to build public awareness and involvement in protecting water resources around the world and encourage people to conduct basic monitoring of their local water bodies.