 Well, hello and welcome to this virtual Ebola reporting workshop in English. This is Binidic Paveo live from London. Thank you very much for joining us for this second part of this interactive training session. We're going to move on now to case studies of Ebola reporting, both international and African examples will be discussed. Now, while we listen to our second expert, please continue thinking of questions during the first part. Johannesburg and Accra were extremely active. Please continue to be so. But also wherever you are in the world, let's have you in on questions as well. So our next expert is a specialist in health policy issues and environmental health risk. His name is Jonathan Hamilton, John. I understand John. Hello. Hello. You're joining us from Washington and you've been a science correspondent at NPR News since 1998. You were part of a team of NPR reporters who just gone to Liberia in October 2014. So just weeks ago to cover the Ebola outbreak. I understand that the first part of your talk is going to be describing how we approach or how you approached NPR covering Ebola during that trip. But first, I understand you're just off quarantine. Is that right? What did it involve? That is correct when I came back to, we came back to Dulles Airport here in Virginia. And when we, when our team returned, we were put in a room where we were questioned by health authorities. And we were told that our names were going to be sent to the local public health officials here. And so sure enough, the next morning I got a call from the D.C. Department of Public Health. And I had a case officer assigned to me and I checked in with him twice a day to give my temperature and to say whether I had any symptoms that were about Ebola that went on for 21 days. Right. So you are now out of quarantine. I am. Excellent. Very good to hear. And congratulations. That's very good to hear. So now let's go to your talk, the case studies of Ebola reporting. Let's hear from you directly, your very recent experience on approaching covering Ebola. All right. I think I have some slides here. At least I hope I do. It's a cue for techies to experts to do their thing and they're doing it right now. You can begin talking. So let me, let me start. I just want to say a few words about my own experiences covering Ebola in Liberia, which ended just a few weeks ago. So let me say a little bit about NPR. If you haven't heard of NPR, it's a little bit like the BBC, but of course not nearly as large. We have about 700 employees and a couple of hundred journalists. So back in April of this year, we decided that we needed to start covering the Ebola outbreak. That was at the very beginning. It was just beginning to show up some cases coming out of Guinea. It was showing up in northern Liberia near Sierra Leone. And since that time, we have had at least 10 different teams go to West Africa to cover the story. I was part of a team that was in Liberia in the second half of October. And one of the things I want to emphasize is that I was part of a team. I was not doing this alone. It is much easier to cover Ebola if you have some help. And in the spirit of team members, let me introduce you to a couple of other members of the team to give you a sense of how we approached covering this story. So these are my colleagues, Rolando Arrieta and Mike Lane Ducleff. Obviously, Mike Lane is on the right. She works for the website of NPR. Rolando is a producer. So we had people with different skills going along. And I should say that was just part of the team. We also had a local journalist, and I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to have somebody who knows the local area. This is a woman named Siada Johnson. She's a journalist in Liberia. And she was our, as we often say, a fixer, but she also was a lot more than that. One of the things I learned is that having somebody there, you can get stories you never would have got otherwise, and I'll talk a little bit about that later. One other note about Liberia and some of the West Africa countries, if you speak American English as I do, Liberian English can be a huge challenge. And so it can be very helpful to have somebody simply to translate. Another person on our team, you have to have a local driver. It is impossible to find your way around a place like Liberia on your own. Often there are not street signs, often the roads are very bad. And you need to trust your driver. This is Muhammad. We trusted him with our lives, literally. He knew local languages, which helps you get through checkpoints, which up in the north part of the country can be a little dicey. And of course the other reason that a driver is so important, and trustworthiness is so important, is because when you're in a place with Ebola, we need to know that no infected person had been in our vehicle. Now, transmission of Ebola is not that easy, but you need to make sure that you're not in direct contact with any fluids from a person who's had Ebola. So we trusted Muhammad with our vehicle and with knowing who had been in it at all times. So that was our team. And all five of us on this team were together most of the time in Liberia. We did go our separate ways a few times, but most of the time this truly was a team effort. Let's see if I can get the next slide here. Let me say a few words about our approach to this coverage. By the time we got there, people had been covering Ebola for some months. So a lot of the reporting was pretty familiar to people. Ebola was all over the newspapers on TV, and so people had seen and heard a lot about it. You look at this picture, for instance, and this is a picture I took on our first day in Monrovi. It's a common scene. It's an Ebola ambulance and a team, you know, in the moonsuits picking up a patient, in this case somebody who died probably of Ebola, although that's not confirmed till later. And we saw ambulances like this on a pretty regular basis. Another really familiar, almost cliche scene is this hospital redemption hospital in Monrovi. It's a place that has treated a whole lot of Ebola patients. They actually closed down at one point because they were overwhelmed. And it's a place where some caregivers have contracted the virus and somehow died. So we were here at this hospital to interview a midwife. We were there for a very different purpose than just looking at care of Ebola. We were there to talk to a midwife about the challenge of delivering babies during an Ebola outbreak. And I will talk a little bit more about some of what we call the secondary aspects of the Ebola outbreak, including delivering babies a little bit later. I'll get the next slide to come up here. So our challenge, the way we saw it, was to come up with something new to say, something that hadn't been reported already. They knew that Ebola was killing people. They knew it was a terrible disease. And all of the scenes I just showed you were really familiar. So I think this is a big challenge now for all reporters who are going to cover Ebola. What can you say that hasn't been said already? Our approach was to pick some themes that we wanted to cover, things that had not received a whole lot of attention. One of these themes was that stopping Ebola requires people to get over the stigma attached to the disease. I know that in questions I heard earlier from people, people mention stigma several times, and there is a huge stigma attached to Ebola. If people fear they are shunned, if they have symptoms, they will not seek medical care when they get sick, and they are much more likely to pass along the virus. So the stigma aspect is really big. We were looking for a way to tell this story, and oddly enough, what we ended up doing was finding a story in a church, not any church. We were in the Episcopal Cathedral in Monrovia, and this was the first Sunday we were in country, and we were there because we had heard that a reverend was going to tell his own personal story about having contact with Ebola. And I should say that nobody gets into this church or any of the other churches we saw in Liberia until they've washed their hands with chlorine. The so-called Ebola buckets are everywhere in this country, and you wash your hands probably 20 or 30 times a day. Also in this church, people do not make physical contact. Even communion here is done in a way that makes sure there is no contact that could possibly transmit the virus, so it gives you a sense of how much Ebola has changed things in this country. The story we told is about Reverend Herman Brown, this guy, and he was scheduled to return to the pulpit after he and his family had been quarantined for 21 days. That is the quarantine period, of course, for Ebola, and they were quarantined because his wife had, out of the goodness of her heart, taken care of a sick friend, and it later turned out that friend had Ebola. She did not die, but clearly the wife had been exposed, and so the Reverend had been exposed as well. What made this story unusual was that the Reverend Brown, unlike many people, was extremely open about his exposure. He immediately called and told the church what had happened. He said he was going to put himself into quarantine, and that is hugely important because even in this country, many people are stigmatized in a way that is severely damaging to them. Many people cannot go back to their jobs even after they have passed 21 days, or people who have had Ebola and have recovered have found that they are not welcome in their communities, they don't have a job anymore. So the stigma issue was huge, and for him to step up and do this, we thought was a fascinating story, and, of course, finding, being there on the day when he returned to church to tell his story was a rare opportunity. So he told his story from hundreds of parishioners there. Including this child who was looking at me and not at what was going on. And what the Reverend's message was that people need to not turn away, they need to not try to hide any exposure from Ebola, and they need to embrace the people, not literally, they need to care for the people who have been exposed. So he used himself as an example of how to prevent the spread of the virus by being honest and open. I should say Liberia is a very warm country, so a church service, and this church service goes on for several hours, was incredibly hot, but as the Reverend was telling his story, there was not anybody in that room who was not riveted. You could have heard a pin drop. He had the rapt attention of everybody there, and I think it was a message that got across. Let me just show here all the stories I'm talking about are radio stories, but of course everything we do these days goes on the web as well, so I'm showing you just how this story appeared when it was on the web. The headline is Ebola in Church, or Reverend's Quarantine Spreads the Word. But of course the main vehicle for our reporting is over the air. Let me tell you about another story. Yes, please. Just one second, if I may, to London. The story of this priest is fantastic to hear about his journey and his story and his honesty with his congregation, and of course interestingly how his wife, by being kind and compassionate, unfortunately caught the news. She was exposed to it. She ended up not getting it, but yes, was exposed. Sorry, she was exposed to it. Thank you for that. And of course let me remind everyone we're talking about Ebola, but a lot of the things that we're talking about today would apply to any pandemic. But of course what's great about your going on to that story, verifying it of course, above and beyond that one man, it can inspire other people to be honest and to tell their journey. So it's really important to get that message out. It is, and one of the really gratifying things to see was that after the church service, the Reverend went out and his parishioners came, the people in the congregation came by and they all gave him a hug. He was welcomed back and I think it sent a really powerful message about how if you are open and if people think about it a little bit, that it does not have to be the stigmatized disease that it has been. And also that you can continue your religious practice with some flexibility, with some adaptation and consultation within those religions. There are ways to continue practicing and responding to you, honoring your faith. Absolutely. If you can figure out how to give communion wafers without having any physical contact between one person and another, it makes you realize that you can do a lot of things to adapt to a place where you have a contagious disease and you need not to spread it. Thank you for that. Yeah, sure. Let me briefly talk about a second story that I covered. I mentioned before, one of our missions was to talk about the secondary effects of Ebola. In other words, stories about how the virus is causing great hardship and suffering even among people who never were infected and never will be infected. And one of these secondary effects was about childhood vaccination. We knew that when the Ebola outbreak started, child vaccination pretty much stopped in Liberia. And that is a big deal in a country where literally tens of thousands of children die every year of preventable diseases. So to get this story, I heard some questions earlier about the frustrations of dealing with bureaucracy. We certainly ran into some of that on our trip. Our first stop was to see this guy, his name is Adolphus Clark, and he is a government employee in charge of vaccines for the Ministry of Health. And let me tell you that working through the bureaucracy of the Ministry of Health is not easy. It requires many emails and verifications and phone calls and back and forth, but we were eventually able to get him on tape talking about vaccinations. And by the way, during our time in Liberia, the country began to require journalists to obtain a government permit to work. That's something to be aware of in some of these countries. They also began to require journalists to get specific permission to interview any health official about Ebola. So that made reporting a lot more difficult. You couldn't just go to a hospital and talk to people. You had to be approved before that could take place. The vaccination story we knew was not going to be interesting, it was just a government official talking. So once again, we started looking for a person involved. And to do that, you really have to go to where people are being vaccinated. To do that, you need a contact. So that was a case where my, our fixer, Siada, who, although she was a journalist, didn't have contacts in this realm. So I called UNICEF, which I knew had played a big role in sponsoring vaccination in Liberia. And this picture is of a UNICEF employee named Laurent Duvallier. He's actually worked in another country, but they brought him in to do some work in Liberia. And this picture was taken as we were on the way and we were driving to one of the rural vaccination clinics. Getting places is not easy. You can see there's a lot of water on the road. It's still the rainy season. We were in a four-wheel drive and we almost got stuck. The reason the young man is pointing is because we had been going several miles in the wrong direction. He said, no, the clinic is the other way. And at this point we're probably, oh, I think about an hour from Monrovia. Anyway, we eventually did get to the clinic. I think I have a picture of here. There it is. It's a small place, way out, away from the city. It's in an area where we knew that vaccination rates had been very high, which is a huge thing in Liberia. But after Ebola, vaccination rates in this community had fallen off and we wanted to see how things were going. Get the next slide here. A lot of reporters ask me about safety while covering Ebola. I'm going into clinics, places. They're not specifically for treating Ebola patients, but you never know who's in there. How do you make sure you don't get infected is a question I get a lot. One way you can stay safe is go to places where they have somebody like this at the door. This is at the door of the clinic. No one got in this clinic without having their temperature taken, and as many of you probably know, if you don't have symptoms of Ebola and temperature, an highlighted temperature being one of the key ones, you are probably not contagious. So if you want to stay safe, it's good to interview people in places where they have been screened before you're getting in close proximity to them. This clinic sees mostly mothers and children, which is why it does a lot of vaccination, and this is a picture of a newborn being weighed. This is a woman we talked to who was there to get her child vaccinated. She told us about how a lot of people in the area were still afraid that vaccinations were still, were causing Ebola. But like, and I should say, like a lot of people in Liberia, she does not trust the government. Government trust is not high in this country at all. So when they say get vaccinated or do this about Ebola, people are very skeptical. But she said she trusted the local vaccinator. This was an individual who lived in the area and knew most of the people he vaccinated personally. So the reason she was there was not because she trusted the government, but because she trusted somebody she knew from her community. And we were told that if vaccination is going to succeed in the future, it's going to depend on probably those kind of relationships. I will quickly tell you about a third story we did. It took us to Northern Liberia. Let me get the next slide here if I can. Can I just interject? Yes, please. That's an interesting message really to give to the governments that they need to choose carefully who they choose as people giving the vaccinations, people who are respected in their local communities. We found that over and over again is that people trusted a local contact. If there was trust there, then things would go well. If it was an outsider or somebody they didn't trust, the Ebola ambulances would have stones thrown at them. Terrible things happened. So it's all, you know, epidemics are to a huge extent and public health is to a huge extent about trust. That was one of the things we certainly discovered from our reporting. So hopefully all the journalists watching us today and in the future can help to get that message across. They can help their governments, their health authorities to improve or to get that right. Yeah, it certainly is something where the government can use journalists in a good way to show why they should be trusted. And since we're a little short of time here, I'll quickly talk about the third story that I just wanted to mention, because it has some very different lessons. This is the story we did. We went up to Northern Liberia, near the border with Guinea and Sierra Leone. That is where the outbreak started and we wanted to go back. The reason we wanted to go back is we had heard that in this area where it had been at the worst and where it started was also an area where they had brought the epidemic under control, where there were not getting a lot of new cases and we wanted to know why. So our goal was to get to the town of Foya, which is where this was going on. It is really remote. If you drive, it's about 12 hours from Monrovia. We found an alternative. We hitched to ride in this UN helicopter. And by the way, there was nothing special about us. You can apply to get a ride on a UN helicopter if you're willing to go through the bureaucracy to get there. It's not all that hard to do. This is me on the helicopter. It was a several-hour flight. And this is where we ended up. This is Foya, up in the very northern-most part of Liberia. And you may see the woman there is from Metz and Saint-Françoisier, Doctors Without Borders. And if you look over her left shoulder off in the distance, you can see that is where, I guess you would call it the clinic. They would call it a care center. They said it would be unfair to say we are providing treatment. So we don't call it a treatment center. We call it a care center. They gave a place to isolate patients who had it. They made sure they had fluids. They made sure they were being looked after. But there is no treatment or certainly there was no treatment then for Ebola. And so they did not call it a treatment center. Anyway, this is where we eventually landed. And this was after several hours drive after getting off the helicopter. By the way, I learned after I got back to the states that one of those UN helicopters had crashed a couple of years ago. But fortunately, I did not know that at the time. At the clinic, we talked to everybody because we wanted to understand what was working here. So this is a guy we talked to. He's a survivor of Ebola. He was passed his quarantine. He survived, so did his granddaughter. But the story he's telling us there is about how every single other person in his family died of the disease. It got into one of them. They were all in the same household in a very small space. They all got it. And almost all of them died. I think there were eight or nine total in the family. We also talked to the people who take care of Ebola patients. We talked to a bunch of the nursing staff. They wear those rubber boots. In case you haven't seen those already, they wear them mostly because they get their feet sprayed with chlorine all the time as they're going in and out of different areas. And so your shoes come apart pretty fast. I should mention that many of the reporters, when you're doing these stories, you wear rubber boots as well because otherwise your shoes will be bleached out completely after a couple of days. This is a guy we talked to. The only job it is to mix chlorine for the center. He makes sure the concentrations are right. He makes sure everybody has enough. And what we learned from all of these people was that the success in stopping Ebola had to do with getting local people to trust the local healthcare workers. At the beginning, people had suspected that healthcare workers were bringing Ebola. They thought that they were taking people away to steal their organs and sell them on the international market. So what happened was these healthcare workers began a sort of public relations campaign. They found ways to allow family members to come see sick loved ones while they were in the center from a distance, from a safe distance, but they could visit them so they knew they hadn't been taken away and had their organs stolen. They let the family members of somebody who died, they let them see the body before it was buried and they showed them where it was going to be buried. They followed completely safe practices in burying the bodies, but they made sure it was no longer a mystery. And these changes, there were a bunch of others, but these kind of changes made all the difference. This is a place where instead of workers and the ambulance being greeted with hostility, perhaps even violence in some cases, people knew the number to call, they would call, and then they knew that they could come visit somebody. So it changed the system where people were being hidden away in houses and infecting other people, and it was a huge role in controlling the epidemic in this area. And this is the story. As it ran, Ebola strategy brings good news to one Liberian town. And just so you don't think that reporting on Liberia is all about hardship and difficulty, this is a picture I took of one of the dinners we had where we were in a hotel in Vojima, and it was quite delightful. I should say that the travels were not all hardship. There were many parts about them that were wonderful. And let me just say one other really quick thing about safety, because I get asked about this all the time, it's really pretty simple, right? We never made contact with anybody, physical contact. Nobody in Liberia shakes hands, and we didn't either. We didn't shake hands, we didn't touch anything when we were in a hospital or an area. We didn't touch any person when we were out reporting. We washed our hands all the time at these Ebola buckets, like the one you see in this picture. And we never went any place where protective gear was required. I have seen pictures of reporters all decked out in protective gear. I really question whether that's necessary. We did interview some patients across a safe space, but we never went anywhere where we needed protective gear and that was one way we knew that we were staying in a safe area. So there you have it, it's the abbreviated version of how NPR approached covering Ebola. Thank you very much, Jonathan, for that. We have indeed a question from Chinyere Okia from Hot FM in Abuja, Nigeria. And he asks, how did you acquire the protective gear for your reporting on Ebola? And what happens in cases where journalists want to report but don't have the proper protective gear? I don't think you need a lot of protective gear. We took, before we left, we took a bag that had, we had a few face masks, although we never used them, I should say. Rubber boots were key because you're forever walking, especially before we got there. It was routine to actually walk through a sort of a trough of chlorine liquid. You can't do that in regular shoes. And so it's an easy way to keep your feet from becoming contaminated in an area. We had, you know, our safety equipment was along the lines of, you know, Clorox wipes and hand gel. And I don't think you need a lot of protective equipment. And we certainly didn't have anything that you couldn't get in a regular pharmacy. There was nothing special. We did not have the moon suits. We did not have, you know, Tyvek garments and that kind of stuff. We just didn't need them. Well, thank you for that. And I think it's a timely message that I can share now about helping African journalists fight the spread of Ebola. There are many countries that are threatened by the Ebola virus. It's not just Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, of course, where they've been struck particularly hard. But many of those countries have actually very few resources to report on the crisis. So there are actually three international organizations that have launched an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign to get vital equipment to local radio stations in the worst affected areas. They are the World Federation of Science Journalists, the WFSJ, in association with Irondelle, USA, and the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters, AMARC. And they've created the first, the fundraising campaign to help local radio stations and their staff in Ebola affected regions. So you can help. I'm now speaking to all you journalists throughout the world listening to us, looking at us. You can help spread this message to help these journalists fight the spread of Ebola by improving their reporting, by having the proper equipment. I'll give the address which is quite a mouthful once. Bear with me. If you don't catch it the first time, I very much hope that your U.S. embassies, consulates and other places will be able to give you this address again. So here we go. Here's the mouthful. But it's worth it. H-T-T-P-S. Semicolon. Slash, slash. W-W-W. Indiegogo. That's spelled I-N-D-I-E-G-O-G-O. Dot, com. Slash. Projects. P-R-O-J-E-C-T-S. Slash. Help. H-E-L-P. Hyphen. African. Hyphen. Journalists. So that's journalist in the plural. Hyphen. Fight. Hyphen. The. Hyphen. Spread. Spelled. S-P-R-E-A-D. Hyphen. Of. Another hyphen. Ebola. Slash. X. Slash. We're getting there. 8809970. There we are. An important message even if that website address is a little hard. Do you get some help if you need that? It's a worthy cause. Thank you for that, Jonathan. Did you want to share very briefly with us, and I'm afraid it will have to be briefly before we take questions, some coverage of the outbreak that you think has been good? Yeah, let me do that, and I won't show any slides, so I'll just move this through this very quickly. I'll just talk. Thank you. I've read a lot of Ebola coverage in recent months. I've read some that I felt not so good about. But let me talk about some of the things that I thought were really good. First thing I found is that reporters who actually go to the trouble to learn something about the Ebola virus, the science behind it, do a much better job. The New York Times has done some really nice work explaining the virus, where it came from, how it spread, all these kinds of things. There is a scientific underpinning that will really strengthen reporting. I think the place they've done a good job, they have reporters who have taken the time to delve into that. The other thing I would say is that journalists who have done the best job have really been able to get a local perspective. So if you're coming from the U.S. as I am, don't just come with the perspective of how scared people are in the U.S. Think about what are the problems facing the people in the country that you're reporting on? What does it look like from the standpoint of somebody from Liberia or Sierra Leone? There's a story I was going to show a slide of, but Colleen Cooper of the New York Times has done a wonderful job of this, and one of the reasons is that she grew up in Liberia. And so when she went back, she was able to do a story about the political implications of whether people were going to win or lose elections, which was actually hugely important to the people of Liberia. It's not just about whether it's going to spread to another country, it has big impacts locally, and if you find people who have that local understanding, you'll do a much better job reporting. One other thing is worth noting is you have to be willing to what I would call go deep. You have to be willing to put in the time to get to remote places. One of my colleagues, Kelly McEvers, followed a contact tracing team. They hiked four hours into a place looking for somebody who they did not find, and then they hiked four hours back out again. I think the reporters who are willing to put in that time get the better stories and really convey the difficulty of coping with this outbreak. I think places that show the whole story, some news organizations, including the BBC, have done a wonderful job of curating their courage. You go to a page and you'll see a place where you can get to lots of different stories about Ebola. Where it came from, the science behind it, the latest numbers, all of that stuff, I think that's a huge service to people. I mentioned before about following the science. I know that one of my favorite BBC pieces was actually about them tracking bushmeat. Many people think that's where the epidemic probably started, but they went in a really interesting deep way into looking at where does bushmeat come from? Is eliminating it? Is it banning it really going to solve the problem? People, they quoted, said, no, that would probably just drive it underground and that's probably not a good thing. I will stop there. Why don't we leave some time for questions? Jonathan, thank you so very much for your presentation. Also, you're open as to questions. It makes a real difference. Here's a question from Abuja Nigeria. It's from Uche Nuizu of NTA. How do I strike a balance between what officials tell me about Ebola and the reality on the ground about the Ebola situation in a particular country? Yeah, this is something I think all of us who've tried to cover this story have grappled with. And everybody's numbers are a little suspect. The numbers are very hard to come by in an outbreak like this. One of the things I came away from after visiting the Ministry of Health in Liberia was that they really don't know with any precision how many people are getting the virus every day or every week. So how do you cope with, you know, how do you strike a balance between? Well, I think the balance is that you report what officials say because after all, that's part of your job. But I spent a lot of time, as did my team, trying to verify what people said. If they said, oh yes, vaccination is still happening, you go. You go to the place. And you ask the people, are kids getting vaccinated here? If they say no, you have to include that in your report. So it's a kind of a trust a little bit, but verify a lot would be, I think, the strategy. Trust a little bit, verify a lot. That's a good one. I'm sure you're being heard out there now. You're being heard in Accra. And here's a question. I can't be everywhere at all times. So how can I get contacts of other health reporters for active, authentic news to share? That's an interesting question. You know, my strategy has been, and actually before I went to Liberia, I went and read everything that people were reporting. And I made a short list of the people I thought were doing interesting coverage and I thought had a good idea. And I actually contacted some of them. Reporters' skills are based on their reporting, right? If you see a name, I think most reporters are pretty open to being contacted, certainly on an informal basis. And for instance, we talked to Helene Cooper of the New York Times before we went because we thought it might be useful. And so, you know, read what's out there and contact the people you think are doing a good job. Yes, so sometimes that's important to do it beforehand. We all work with very tight deadlines. That's not always possible. But if you can give people again some time to respond, realizing that they're probably very busy, that helps as well, as well as when you're on the ground, of course. Indeed. And when you are on the... Let me just add one more thing about when you are on the ground. You know, the people you will not find when you're searching Google News for stories are some of the local reporters. So if you possibly can, you know, if you're at the Ministry of Health at the press conference and you see some of the local reporters there, talk to them. You often get great information. One thing I should add about our fixer, Seattle Johnson, she is the president of the Women's Journalist Association of Liberia and so was able to put us in touch with a number of local journalists who are wonderful resource. And I guess that's another thing to look for. Look for the journalism organization that's specific to that country and send a note, find out who's covering that story. Yes, get local knowledge, local national regional knowledge, dig down into your sources. And indeed, this really is pertinent to the question sent by Chiquizier Omedje from Acer Radio in Abuja. Hello, Chiquizier. What sources of information were most reliable during your reporting trip? So you're going to tell us local knowledge amongst others? The most reliable people were... Let me give an example. You go to the Ministry of Health. They will give you national statistics on vaccination rates that were way out of date. They would tell you about what happened for last year. When you go to the local center, the local vaccination center, and you talk to the vaccinator, the local person, he pulled out a sheet of paper that had the names of every person in the past two years he's vaccinated. Which vaccines they got? Which people had not come in for scheduled vaccines? So again, the people on the scene are so much more reliable than people who are removed and getting reports. After all, it's second-hand news if some minister is getting it back in the capital. Go to the source. From two reporters in Abuja, what should a journalist do when restricted to speak or interview an Ebola patient in an isolation center and also on a related note? How close can a reporter get to an Ebola patient? We interviewed... And the NPR teams interviewed a number of Ebola patients. Now, keep in mind, most people in the symptomatic stages of Ebola are not in a state to do an interview. These people are extremely sick. So your opportunities are going to be somewhat limited. Most of the care centers that we visited have set up areas now where what they do is they have two fences about six feet apart. And patients can come up to the one fence on the inside and reporters and visitors can come up to the fence on the other side. And so you're never going to get within more than five or six feet of these people. And that is a completely safe distance. You ask how close can you get, especially if you're outside this virus, like most viruses, is very subject to ultraviolet light, which you get from sunlight, and it sterilizes everything. So if you're outside and you're four or five feet away talking to somebody and you don't touch them, you are completely safe. And the one also about what should a journalist do when restricted to speak or interview an Ebola patient in an isolation center? I'm trying to understand exactly what, well, an isolation center being a place where there's a physical separation between patients and other people. Is that what we're talking about? One thing you can try is some of the centers now, and thank you, technology, there are actually a number of centers that have put a cell phone that patients can use so they can call their families. If you can get the number to that cell phone, you can talk to anybody in there even if you're nowhere in the area. And so this is an option that we saw several places that I had no idea about, but if you call a care facility and say, is there a cell phone? And they keep these cell phones just inside with the patients so there's no chance that they would be carrying the virus outside. But that's another approach to how to deal with people who are in isolation. That's a really interesting tip. Use the phone. Well, first find out if there is one. Find out if there is one. Yes. And then call it. Oh, actually speaking of which, I've read some articles on the fact that some toll-free numbers that have been set up sometimes don't work. What do journalists do then? You mean toll-free numbers to get information about Ebola? Ebola, yes, by health authorities or governments. We found... How did you get around that? Yeah, it's a challenge. And in Liberia, for instance, some of the numbers don't work. If you go to the websites, the pages haven't been updated in three or four months. We often went to the local journalists or people or journalists who had been in country before and said, is there a number that works? Is there another way? But you often have to dial and dial and dial. If the toll-free number doesn't work, you have to start calling the numbers that charge. And if that means calling the Ministry of Health and saying, what is the number to get the Ebola figures, then that's what you've got to do. Keep chasing the right number. Here's another question from Abuja. So what should a journalist do when government officials and health workers are not releasing facts about an outbreak or correct prevention measures? I think you do what reporters always do when a source shuts you down. You go to alternative sources. If you're not getting facts and figures locally, you can then go to the World Health Organization and see what they have. Those numbers may not be as good, but at least there are some numbers. They're a starting point. And as far as prevention information, I think journalists can get that from, you know, you can get it from our CDC here in the United States. You can get it from the World Health Organization. And I would think that a journalist in any country where there is a possibility that Ebola could come, there's certainly any country in West Africa, and as we've seen, even in the U.S., you know, patients can show up. I think everybody needs to know about prevention measures and that it is a useful service for journalists to report on those, whether or not you have any government official talking about them in your area. Thank you for that. From Lutenggan Nohawanga of TBC in Dar es Salaam. Hello, Dar es Salaam. Thank you for being with us. You worked with local journalists. How competent were they in reporting Ebola? It varied a lot. One of the things about West Africa is that the journalists do not have the resources and they don't have the news organizations of the size that we have in Europe and the U.S. and many other places. And so you don't have people, for instance, who are specialized in science reporting who've covered epidemics before. So you find the local journalists rarely have that kind of specialized knowledge, certainly not the kind of knowledge that somebody like Martin Enterick has about this virus. However, what they did have was a really good sense of some other things, like the political reasons that the government might be saying one or another thing about the virus. So whereas I think some of the foreign reporters had the edge as far as understanding the disease, I think the local reporters were much more sophisticated when it came to the political implications and to know when somebody might be not telling the truth or why they may not be telling the truth. That's very good insight information. Also, thank you for your honesty, Jonathan. So the final question is from Akra. Could the failure of journalists in Ebola-affected countries to report or raise alerts, be blamed for the crises? That's hard to say. I guess I'm trying to think if there's an example that makes sense. I mean, I think if I were to talk about failures, I would point much more toward government failures than journalistic failures. I think there's probably a point to be made that sometimes when the government is silent, the journalists go silent as well, which is a mistake. I mean, just because a government won't talk about something doesn't mean that you as a journalist shouldn't be reporting it. But I would not say that there have been outbreaks caused by the media failing to get the story out. My experience has been in most countries where something is going on in the media has done a pretty good job of getting the word out. Jonathan Hamilton from National Public Radio in Washington. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for your insights, your honesty, and some very, very useful tips on improving really reporting on Ebola, case studies from not just Africa, but also some international examples on good reporting what to do and what not to do. A lot of, well, knowledge and also local knowledge that you've helped to share with us. Thank you so much. I'm sure that we will have all learned a lot from that session.