Attacking the information failures on Ebola

Every day marks a new deadly chapter in the Ebola crisis. As of this week more than 4,000 lives have been lost, the virus is entrenched and accelerating in West Africa, and it is now spreading into the Western world.

What we may have once brushed off as one region’s tragedy is now an unavoidable global catastrophe.

It is an escalating crisis that needs all of our help. We need to find new and creative ways to raise awareness, to amplify aid and to generate solutions-driven thinking. We need empowering ideas that can cut through the noise and fear.

That’s why we’ve joined forces with a team of partners to launch Ebola Deeply, a digital media platform that will chronicle the crisis, bringing together a diverse set of voices in a single news and information hub. With a mix of journalists, technologists and scientists, we are finding new ways to cover the outbreak, shedding light on multiple dimensions of the problem.

Why did we do it? Because embedded within the Ebola crisis there is an information crisis. There has been a lack of coherence in the narrative, a persistent gap in what we need to know in order to tackle the spread and end the outbreak. Those gaps in information have led to missed moments and overlooked opportunities for impact – ones we can no longer afford to ignore.

The gaps have operated on three levels: on the ground, in the media and across global organizations working towards an effective response.

On the ground – especially in the critically affected countries of West Africa – there has been a rampant fear and dangerous mythology around the disease. While authorities and global organizations are hard at work trying to educate the public, harmful rumours and wild conspiracy theories still abound. In Nigeria, some have propagated claims that drinking salt water every day would prevent the disease; at least two people died trying. In Liberia, others said that chewing cola nuts and eating potato greens was an effective cure; also, that Ebola was divine retribution for crimes committed during the country’s civil war.

Misinformation has also led to a devastating stigma around survivors. Dr. Melvin Korkor, a senior physician and professor at Liberia’s College of Health Sciences, was one of the first patients to survive Ebola. But since then he says he’d been shunned by friends and colleagues. Even his children have been treated like outcasts.

As he explained to our reporters, that’s not only hurtful to him; it’s harmful for Ebola patients, compounding the emotional toll and making it harder for them to recover. “Ebola is something that is very stressful,” he told us. “Depression is contributing to the mortality rate.”

In the media, information gaps have existed since the first sign of the outbreak. While there has been a surge of reporting in recent weeks, on the whole, news coverage of the Ebola crisis has faded in and out since the outbreak in March. We need more consistency and greater coherence in how we tell this story to the global public.

There are also substantive adjustments that need to be made to how we explain the Ebola outbreak. We need to elevate local voices and avoid enforcing the narrative of an “us” and a “them” – the notion that we’re “here” and the disease is “over there” – something that can be fought with travel bans and quarantines in faraway lands. We need to work against creating what Seth Godin called “a rising cycle of misinformation, demonization and panic … pushing us apart and paralyzing us”.

Moreover, we need to cover the Ebola crisis with greater sensitivity to the science. On one hand, the probability that Ebola will go airborne is probably extremely low based on our limited current data. On the other hand, Ebola virus has mutated hundreds of times since it emerged in this outbreak and we cannot rule out any possibility of what it’s doing or how it might be spreading next. Scientific coverage of this and many issues requires a delicate balance: we can neither succumb to fear-mongering, nor give empty assurances to calm those fears without the full scientific facts.

The third information gap is the one that is most important to solve. It is the gap among individuals, organizations and key stakeholders, within the community of crisis response. Numerous courageous and capable organizations and individuals are doing vital work on the ground. But again and again, they’ve told us they wished they knew what their counterparts were doing in other areas affected by the crisis. They want to more readily connect.

Crisis coordination and global governance systems are in use, but they have never had to cope with something of this kind. In terms of urgency, it is the magnitude of the 2004 Asian tsunami or the 2010 Haiti earthquake, coupled with the intensity and volatile nature of the 2003 SARS epidemic. None of the ways we traditionally do things is going to work now.

There is a great need and a key opportunity to tie the many parties together, with a platform for coordination and constructive conversation. It is a place where we can feature emerging solutions, like technologies such as mobile solutions for Geographic Information Systems and digital campaigns that get thousands of volunteer health workers signed up to help at frontline organizations. These solutions need to be well catalogued and understood. In doing so we can also mobilize more and better resources for our response to Ebola, while integrating new people who want to support efforts to end the outbreak. As it stands, even people in Liberia and Sierra Leone, looking for ways to volunteer, tell us they haven’t been able to figure out how.

We need to make up for lost time. We need a more agile response. We need to bring our best to the table.

Through the Ebola Deeply initiative, we’re creating a new dialogue – a channel for shaping the conversation, online and off. It is a step towards solving the information problem, in its various dimensions. We’ll be engaging a range of people and organizations to see how it can best support their work. We hope it can serve people around the world, providing robust information in a situation that can’t afford to proceed without it.

Authors: Lara Setrakian is the Founder and Executive Editor of News Deeply and a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader. Pardis Sabeti is an Associate Professor at Harvard University and at the Broad Institute, researching Ebola and Lassa virus, and is also a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader.

Image: Girls look at a poster, distributed by UNICEF, bearing information on and illustrations of best practices that help prevent the spread of Ebola virus disease (EVD), in the city of Voinjama, in Lofa County, Liberia in this April 2014 UNICEF handout photo. REUTERS/Ahmed Jallanzo/UNICEF/Handout via Reuters

This is part of a series of posts marking the 10-year jubilee of the World Economic Forum’s community of Young Global Leaders.