Ebola Response Must Incorporate Gender Lens

Foreign Policy: Why Are So Many Women Dying From Ebola?
Lauren Wolfe, journalist and director of Women Under Siege

“Sitting in her house in Massachusetts, [Martha Anker, a former statistician in communicable disease surveillance and response at the WHO,] had a gut feeling: that Ebola, as it had in the past, would claim women as its primary victims. … It shouldn’t take so many deaths — more than 1,200 at the time of this writing — to realize how attention to gender dynamics might help save lives. … With so many dying in West Africa, there is an opportunity to go against the grain, to try to incorporate a much-needed gender lens into medical and social responses. Now is the time to do it — just like it was in the last crisis” (8/20).

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