Analysis: The culture of health and sickness

Professor David Napier (UCL Anthropology) discusses a case study of a Ugandan community and takes away lessons to be learned about vulnerability before disasters. A group of researchers, led by David Mafigiri at Makerere University in Uganda, began collecting data this January for a long-planned health vulnerability assessment to identify what makes people and communities more vulnerable or resilient to infectious diseases. The data is now being analysed. But it is clear that, since lockdowns are still in place globally for fieldworkers and there is a hold on almost all face-to-face public health research, Uganda may have the only systematic real-time data on how people in at-risk communities conceptualise and respond to the virus. The information the assessments collected is notable. The interviews lasted between one and three hours, much longer than a normal health survey. Instead of taking blood samples and asking multiple choice questions, researchers met participants in their homes and had structured but wide-ranging conversations about access to services, about availability of medical care and other health-related information, and about local conventions, practices and norms - 'culture'.