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WiRED International Expands Ebola Education in Africa
BY ALLISON KOZICHAROW, EDITED BY BERNICE BORN
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iRED International, now in its 12th year of operation in Africa, provided Ebola training during various events and presentations throughout Kenya.
Vaccines immunize individuals against disease, and when enough people are vaccinated, they even protect the unvaccinated around them through “community immunity.” We believe that health education acts in the same way. Providing health education to as many people in a community as possible helps the entire community combat threatening health issues. On this trip to Kenya we found that residents are more than eager to learn about Ebola and other health topics—then spread the word to others.
The WiRED International team met with students and recent graduates from the University of Nairobi, School of Public Health, to discuss Ebola training and research. They will conduct training in schools and community settings, as well as gather research data to determine the effectiveness of teaching various audiences about Ebola. Further, the research will help determine if learning about Ebola contributes to the sense people have about their ability to avoid the illness.
WiRED International also offered an Ebola train-the-trainer session for medical students in Kisumu, a city of 400,000 on Lake Victoria in western Kenya. Twelve people attended the session to study the basic and the advanced (health care worker) Ebola modules. The group also discussed their assessments of the modules, with particular interest in the cultural appropriateness of the material. The modules, they said, were in sync with Kenyan culture, and that each was appropriate for its targeted audience: students and families, adults and health care workers.
Lillian Dajoh, CHE Coordinator
Fifty people from Obunga, a hard-bitten area of tin shacks and open trenches, packed a room where WiRED coordinator Lillian Dajoh conducted a 1.5 hour training session about Ebola. She engaged the audience in an animated discussion about Ebola signs and symptoms and prevention measures offered in the student module. In addition, the WiRED International team collected data from the attendees to determine how well they learned about Ebola in this session. The data are now being coded, and the results will be available in several weeks.
WiRED International’s director, Gary Selnow, Ph.D., met with Dr. Jackson Muriithi, an official with the Kenyan Ministry of Health (MOH) who is in charge of health programs for Kenya’s airports. One of his responsibilities is to screen people who enter Kenya through the airports. This includes taking the body temperature of all travelers and training all airport personnel who could come in contact with people who might arrive with Ebola.
Dr. Selnow said, “He and I went over WiRED’s Ebola training material, and he was impressed with the accuracy and thoroughness of the presentations. Dr. Muriithi said he will introduce the modules to others at the MOH and possibly use them in group training sessions with airport workers.”
Although WiRED’s Community Health Education Library contains modules on more than 300 topics, Ebola, at this time, dominates the health concerns of Kenyans from grassroots community members to public officials. This trip contributed to WiRED’s goal of advancing Ebola training on prevention measures to prepare populations well before the virus might make its way to this part of Africa.
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