Congo’s Ebola crisis threatens to spiral out of control - PBS NewsHour

David Miliband:

Well, you're making a really important point.

This is a battle not just against a disease. It's a battle against fake news and it's a battle for public opinion. Absolutely key, the central lesson of the Ebola outbreaks that have happened before is winning the confidence of the community.

And what's happened in this case is, clearly, this is an area of historic opposition to central government, and it's an area where the rumor mill about Ebola and how it's being spread is going in precisely the wrong direction.

We need to reset the response, so that, instead of the engagement of the community coming as the last thing, it's actually the foundation of the response. It needs to be local people who are trained to do the prevention and control. It needs to be local people who are going around with the vaccine, because there is a vaccine in this case — 100,000 people have had it, but many more need to do so.

Without that, you have this massive trust gap, whose worst suspects are assaults on health service staff, who are only there, after all, to serve local people.

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