Destigmatizing the Ebola Virus in Africa
Although the Ebola virus in West Africa has taken the back seat in national media coverage in the United States compared to weeks ago, the virus continues to rage on in West Africa. One issue surrounding the treatment of those individuals who are infected with the virus has consistently been how to get those individuals out of their homes and into treatment centers. Since the outbreak reached the attention of the world, multiple news outlets have reported on this fact, including a June article in NPR. The article reports that many choose to conceal the fact that they are infected with the virus or choose to treat loved ones themselves without going to medical treatment centers in the region. As a result, many were not getting the treatment they needed to survive and the virus would spread.
Still, taking the networks cascading principle, it is possible to imagine how to inform communities to better share information about the virus and to get those infected with the virus into proper medical care.
For this scenario, let’s treat a Western African community as a network, with each person acting as a node and each tie being a strong tie between family members and close family friends. Each node will have a certain level of fear of the virus and will choose whether or not to conceal whether or not they have the virus to officials. If a community member or number of community members are introduced into the community who believe that they should self-report themselves as having Ebola, then they can begin to influence the network in cascades. If they network with individuals and those individuals have a q value that can be satisfied by the ratio of their ties to the number of ties held with the new members, then they will be influenced to reveal whether or not they have the virus to treatment centers. If this is done across the community, then eventually, in the best case scenario, an entire community will begin to stop concealing the virus.