Abstract
What is certain is that pregnancy and childbirth, even during global health disasters and humanitarian emergencies, will always happen. The subject of this book—pregnancy, women, and children during the West Africa Ebola epidemic of 2013–2015—is challenging to capture in an introduction. The problems of pregnancy and childhood during the West Africa Ebola epidemic posed specific challenges and unanswered opportunities that require a biosocial approach, a respect for phenomenological experience, and an unprecedented level of seriousness about sociocultural factors. In the decade before the west African epidemic, significant gains had been achieved in maternal, infant, and childhood health and mortality in the countries most affected by Ebola—Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone. The Ebola epidemic erased these gains. This book establishes a framework of a cross-cutting research agenda that is derived from the necessarily partial and incomplete presentations of evidence and experiences by an interdisciplinary group of contributors who took the risk of sharing what they knew about the Ebola outbreak based upon their own experiences and insights. Each chapter offers a glimpse into one facet of the kaleidoscopic biology, epidemiology, clinical care, and human experience of pregnancy, infancy, and early childhood during the Ebola virus disease epidemic that remain elusive as a whole.
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Notes
- 1.
Kakata is the capital city of Liberia’s Margibi County, located in the Kakata District.
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Abramowitz, S.A. (2019). Ebola’s Assault on Women, Children, and Family Reproduction: An Introduction to the Issues. In: Schwartz, D., Anoko, J., Abramowitz, S. (eds) Pregnant in the Time of Ebola. Global Maternal and Child Health. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97637-2_1
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