Community trust of government and non-governmental organizations during the 2014-16 Ebola epidemic in Liberia

The West African Ebola Virus Disease epidemic of 2014-16 cost more than 11,000 lives. Interventions targeting key behaviors to curb transmission, such as safe funeral practices and reporting and isolating the ill, were initially unsuccessful in a climate of fear, mistrust, and denial. Building trust was eventually recognized as essential to epidemic response and prioritized, and trust was seen to improve toward the end of the epidemic as incidence fell. However, little is understood about how and why trust changed during Ebola, what factors were most influential to community trust, and how different institutions might have been perceived under different levels of exposure to the outbreak. In this large-N household survey conducted in Liberia in 2018, we measured self-reported trust over time retrospectively in three different communities with different exposures to Ebola. We found trust was consistently higher for non-governmental organizations than for the government of Liberia across all time periods. Trust reportedly decreased significantly from the start to the peak of the epidemic in the study site of highest Ebola incidence. This finding, in combination with a negative association found between knowing someone infected and trust of both iNGOs and the government, indicates the experience of Ebola may have itself caused a decline of trust in the community. These results suggest that national governments should aim to establish trust when engaging communities to change behavior during epidemics. Further research on the relationship between trust and epidemics may serve to improve epidemic response efficacy and behavior uptake.     

Photosynthetic parameters, pigment composition and respiration rates of the marine diatom Skeletonema costatum grown in continuous light and a 12:12 h light-dark cycle

Nutrient-sufficient cultures of a Trondheimsfjord (Norway) cloneof the marine centric diatom Skeleionema costatum (Grev.) Clevewere grown at 75 µmol m^–2 s^–1 and 15C at24 and 12 h daylength to study diurnal variations and the effectof daylength on pigment and chemical composition, photosyntheticparameters, dark respiration rates and scaled fluorescence excitationspectra (F), the latter used as estimates for the absorptionof energy available to Photosystem II. Specific growth rateswere 1.06 and 0.56 day^– in 24 and 12 h daylength, respectively,while dark respiration rates were generally 85% of the net growthrate. The Chla-normalized photosynthetic coefficients P^B_m anda^B were {small tilde}20–25% higher in continuous lightthan at 12 h daylength, while the Chla:C ratio was {small tilde}15%lower (0.051 versus 0.061 w:w). Thus, the carbon-normalizedcoefficients P^c_m and a^c were <11% lower at 24 h than at 12h daylength. The maximum quantum yield _max, the Chla:C ratioand F differed negligibly, as did the light saturation indexl_k, the N:C ratio and the ratios Chlc:Chla and Fucoxanthin:Chla. P^B_m and l_k did not exhibit diurnal variations at 24 hdaylength, and varied within 23% of the daily mean at 12 h daylength.Predictions of the daily gross photosynthetic rate based ondata for a given time of the day should thus not be >10%in error relative to an integrated value based on several datasets collected through 24 h. _max was 0.084–0.117 mol O₂(mol photons)^– for gross oxygen evolution. However, ifused in mathematical models for predicting the gross and netgrowth rates (i.e. the gross and net carbon turnover rates),‘practical’ values of 0.076 and 0.040 g-at C (molphotons)^–, respectively, should be employed. Correspondingly,values for a^B and P^B_m should be adjusted pro rata. ¹Present address: College of Marine Studies, Sjmannsveien 27,N-6008 lesund, Norway