All Ebola, all the time
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Liberian journalist Wade C. L. Williams interviewing in the field. |
That’s how HMJ’12 graduate Laura Smith described her health
communications work at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on
the day President Obama came to visit.
Carolyn Crist (HMJ’14) said the same, five weeks earlier, when
physician Kent Brantly and health worker Nancy Writebol arrived at Emory
University Hospital for what turned out to be life-saving care. Crist kept
vigil in greater Atlanta and filed nearly every day for www.wired.com
For Liberian journalist Wade C. L. Williams, life has been
“all Ebola, all the time” since the first cases were identified in March. She
is the newsroom chief for Front Page Africa and her coverage of women in West Africa had already won international awards
before the Ebola catastrophe hit.
Williams comes to UGA next month, where she will give a talk
at the UGA Chapel on Thursday, Oct. 23. The event begins at 4 p.m and all are
welcome.
She’ll have a conversation with a select group of GradyCollege students the day before her public talk, as part of the McGill
Symposium. This is Grady’s annual celebration of journalistic courage, and first-year
HMJ student Christopher McGee is one of this year’s McGill Fellows.
Williams will also spend time with students and faculty
associated with the Center for Tropical and Emerging Global Diseases. CTEGD,
Grady College and UGA’s Office for Academic Programs all worked together to host
her visit. We’re eager for her arrive and hoping that she and her family stay
healthy and that Monrovia’s airport remains open.
Although Front Page Africa is still trying to dig into
political scandals, economic turmoil and other big stories, Ebola coverage is
stretching them thin. Williams is functioning as an editor and as a shoe
leather reporter.
“I've
been scared to death myself sometimes after those difficult assignments,”
Williams wrote in a recent email. “I've covered burials, sick people abandoned,
health facilities abandoned, I've gone into isolation centers, I've interviewed
survivors. But I'm still here, well, not sick.” She’s highly conscious of CDC prevention
guidelines and avoids contact with sick or dead people and their body fluids. Front
Page Africa prominently displays prevention advice and tallies cases and deaths
at the county level.
As an investigative reporter, Williams is not always loved
by the people in power. In a New York Times op-ed piece, Williams lambastes Liberia’s government for
foot-dragging and for stifling media coverage that she says could have
saved lives.
Meanwhile, the United States and other industrialized
nations are finally taking Ebola seriously. As a result, the flow of people and
supplies to West Africa is quickening.
At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, three
recent HMJ graduates are on the Ebola team. Laura Smith’s work in the Joint Information Center of the
Emergency Operations Center earned her an invitation to meet President Obama
when he visited CDC on September 16 to announce additional aid.
All three are
part of the health communications team that competes with misinformation that
inevitably swirls around any high profile disease outbreak. They scramble to
make sure that professionals and the public have timely and accurate information
in a fast-moving world.
Lacey Avery,
who graduated in 2013, works on Ebola response communications in the same room as
Laura. She is part of a team working on messages about infection control and prevention in U.S. and West African healthcare settings. Marcie McClellan, a 2012 HMJ graduate, also develops content but also
checks to see how messages are being received.
“I actually
just back from Arizona where I spent a week facilitating trainings and focus
groups, where I got feedback on our Ebola press releases,” Marcie said in a
Sept. 13 email.
With disease
forecasters saying that Ebola is going to get much worse before it gets better,
the health journalism alums say their agency is in “all-hands-on-deck” mode for
the foreseeable future.
“This is
definitely the most intense response I've been involved in,” said Laura. “It's
all Ebola all the time and the information is constantly changing. My day job
has been put on hold, as is the case with most people involved.”
Independent journalist Carolyn Crist also put her life on
hold when an editor at www.wired.com offered
her the chance to cover the evacuation of two Ebola-infected Americans to
Atlanta.
She moved
into her grandmother's house south of Atlanta and over the next week drove to
press conferences and interviews with experts at Emory University, in Cartersville
(where Phoenix Air is based), at Dobbins
Air Base in Marietta and at Georgia
State University and Georgia Tech.
Carolyn
participated in three press conferences and in three embargoed phone calls
about the latest Ebola vaccine studies, joining the calls with reporters from the
New York Times, Nature, Washington Post, USA Today and other major outlets, an
experience she describes as “thrilling.”
Six of her stories were published online by Wired; she’s now working toward a feature for
the magazine. “Fingers crossed,” Carolyn says.
Ebola is a
global health catastrophe, and its toll on families and communities is sad beyond measure. This is also
a time when reporters and health communicators work to arm us all with information that helps us stay safe and remain connected with our fellow humans.