Politics and trust in Ebola vaccine trials The case of Ghana.

Vaccine trials for infectious diseases take place in a milieu of trust in which scientists, regulatory institutions, and volunteers trust each other to play traditional roles. This milieu of trust emerges from a combination of preexisting linkages embedded in the local and national political context. Using the case of failed vaccine trials in Hohoe, Ghana, we explore this milieu of trust by employing the concept of tandems of trust and control, with a particular focus on the perceived characteristics of the disease and the linkages formed. An analysis of qualitative interviews collected in Hohoe following the West Africa Ebola outbreak of 2014-2016 shows that the trust/control nexus in vaccine trials precedes the implementation of those trials, while both the characteristics of Ebola and the political context shaped the formation and breakdown of relationships in the trial network.

Who's afraid of Ebola? Epidemic fires and locative fears in the Information Age.

Epidemics have traditionally been viewed as the widespread occurrence of infectious disease within a community, or a sudden increase above what is typical. But modern epidemics are both more and less than the diffusion of viral entities. We argue that epidemics are 'fire objects', using a term coined by Law and Singleton: They generate locative fears through encounters that focus attention on entities that are unknown or imprecisely known, transforming spaces and humans into indeterminate dangers, alternating appearance and absence. The Ebola epidemic of 2014 had more complex impacts than the number of infections would suggest. We employ multi-sited qualitative interviews to argue that locative fear is the essence of modern global epidemics. In the discussion we contrast Ebola with both the Zika epidemic that followed and the ongoing coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

Perspectives from nongovernmental organizations on education and training needs for community disaster recovery.

OBJECTIVE: Individuals leading nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) often lack adequate training to best serve their communities' needs during disaster recovery even as they are often tasked with filling in gaps left by governmental and private resources. Thus, it is essential that education and training initiatives address NGO efforts specifically. This paper identifies training and education needs as proffered by organizational representatives that have themselves been involved in long-term recovery efforts following disasters in the past 10 years across Texas. DESIGN, SETTING, AND SUBJECTS: Qualitative interviews with nearly 100 local NGO representatives, government officials, and regional and state-level NGO representatives were conducted using purposive and snowball sampling. The participants conducted recovery activities in six different locations in Texas since 2008. RESULTS: Many respondents noted that they had little experience in disaster recovery and a lack of understanding of what recovery involved. Interviewees identified needs for training including how to coordinate recovery tasks among multiple organizations and agencies (eg, who to involve, what skillsets are needed, what group structure should be formed), how to distribute financial and nonfinancial resources (eg, how to prioritize needs, how to distribute funds, who should receive funding), and how to manage media and external organizational attention. CONCLUSION: This paper provides recommendations for augmenting existing NGO training and educational activities and developing new training schemes offering practical advice from recovery leaders who have been on the frontline of recent disasters.

Improving GNSS PPP Convergence: The Case of Atmospheric-Constrained, Multi-GNSS PPP-AR.

GNSS positioning performance has been shown to improve with the ingestion of data from Global Ionospheric Maps (GIMs) and tropospheric zenith path delays, which are produced by, e.g., the International GNSS Service (IGS). For both dual- and triple-frequency Precise Point Positioning (PPP) processing, the significance of GIM and tropospheric products in processing is not obvious in the quality of the solution after a few hours. However, constraining the atmosphere improves PPP initialization and solution convergence in the first few minutes of processing. The general research question to be answered is whether there is any significant benefit in constraining the atmosphere in multi-frequency PPP? A key related question is: regarding time and position accuracy, how close are we to RTK performance in the age of multi-GNSS PPP-AR? To address these questions, this paper provides insight into the conceptual analyses of atmospheric GNSS PPP constraints. Dual- and triple-frequency scenarios were investigated. Over 60% improvement in convergence time was observed when atmospheric constraints are applied to a dual-frequency multi-GNSS PPP-AR solution. Future work would involve employing the constraints to improve low-cost PPP solutions.