Ebola, informal settlements, and the role of place in infectious disease vulnerability: evidence from the 2014–16 outbreak in urban Sierra Leone
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Studies of vulnerability often focus on the differential susceptibility of marginalised groups to the effects of disaster. This paper considers how vulnerability is also associated with the characteristics of place, especially the social setting of the informal settlement. In this light, it assesses specifically how cultural, historical, and political economic forces resulted in increased vulnerability to Ebola virus disease (EVD) within informal settlements in Sierra Leone during the epidemic of 2014-16. Key informant and community member interviews and focus-group discussions in two communities revealed that increased vulnerability to EVD could, at least in part, be attributed to a set of place-based social factors pertaining to 'community beliefs and practices' (importance of family ties, funeral rites, traditional healing) and 'structural poverty and low socioeconomic status' (poor healthcare provision, mobility patterns, overcrowding). Together, these different factors demonstrate how multiple and intersecting vulnerabilities contribute to the spatial production of disease risk.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".