Jan 28, 2016

Guinea has maintained its Ebola-free status for about one month. Although that bodes well for the country’s people, their protection from another outbreak rests in part on the availability of data for making informed decisions on health priorities.

One researcher who traveled to the country to assess the effects of the Ebola outbreak on the use of routine health services, especially for mothers and children, is Alimou Barry, senior health systems analyst at the $180M USAID-funded MEASURE Evaluation project led by the Carolina Population Center at UNC. His findings were mixed – as he describes in this video – revealing that data were collected even during the height of the epidemic, but were never analyzed or used to recognize the beginnings of the outbreak. Barry also found a decline in use of health services during the outbreak, especially for children, and he found that people who sought treatment for their symptoms early were more likely to survive than those who waited.

Travel with us to Guinea to hear Barry describe what he found and what he suggests for the future. (See the English version at https://vimeo.com/152664842 or French version at https://vimeo.com/153122906.)