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Viral Infections and Outbreaks Research / Zoonotic Diseases and Public Health · Journal article
Medical Anthropology Quarterly · September 9, 2026
Raises a question worth testing. It does not answer one.
This is a qualitative, conceptual ethnographic study that uses a single measles outbreak in Sierra Leone to theorize field epidemiology as a political practice embedded in local governance and social negotiation. The work is exploratory and interpretive, advancing a framework for understanding epidemiological response rather than testing a hypothesis or measuring a clinical or public health outcome.
Qualitative ethnographic case study. A district in Sierra Leone experiencing a measles outbreak five years after the Ebola epidemic. Sierra Leone (district not named in abstract).
Five years after the Ebola epidemic ended, a measles alert triggered an outbreak response in a Sierra Leone district Field epidemiological practice reshapes political relations and orders relations between levels of public health governance Epidemiological work becomes entangled in local political negotiations, generating spaces for contestation, resistance and repair
Safety was not reported in the material analysed. Check the source before drawing any conclusion about harm.
This is not a clinical or epidemiological evidence study. It offers a social and political analysis that may inform how public health professionals understand their role and the unintended consequences of outbreak response within contested local contexts.
A qualitative, narrative-driven ethnographic analysis exploring field epidemiology as political practice through a single measles outbreak case study; raises conceptual questions rather than testing causal claims or providing quantified evidence.
As stated by the source record.
This is not a clinical or epidemiological evidence study. It offers a social and political analysis that may inform how public health professionals understand their role and the unintended consequences of outbreak response within contested local contexts.
Graded across the dimensions that decide whether you should act, each from what the source actually supports. There is no single score, and where a dimension was not assessed it says so.
What is missing. This record has no reported figures. That is a gap in the analysis, not a judgement about the study.
Abstract Five years after the end of the Ebola epidemic, a district in Sierra Leone received a measles alert. This article tells the story of the epidemic that followed and the response that was mounted in the context of the new global epidemic preparedness and biosecurity paradigms that govern the management of health emergencies. Focusing on the daily encounters that constitute outbreak investigations and the narratives, negotiations and contestations that emerge from these interactions, allows us to envision field epidemiology as a political practice. This means seeing how global epidemiological logics converge with local politics and forms of exclusion. Efforts to make epidemics knowable and responding to them, then, reshape political relations, governing citizens and ordering relations between levels of public health governance. At the same time, as field epidemiological work becomes entangled in local political negotiations, it also generates new spaces for contestation, resistance and repair.
Taken from the source record, never inferred. Follow any of these and new work involving them reaches your briefing.