Ebola Care Group resources, updated for 2026
Many CORE Group members helped develop the original Ebola Care Group materials during the 2014–2016 West Africa epidemic. With the Bundibugyo outbreak now declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, Impact Global Health Alliance has updated those resources and is re-releasing them here.
The curriculum was built in 2014–2015 by members of the CORE Group Social and Behavioral Change Working Group, a collaboration among seven member NGOs including Impact Global Health Alliance (then Curamericas Global), Feed the Children, Food for the Hungry, International Medical Corps, Project Concern International, Samaritan’s Purse, and World Relief. We also had contributions from staff at the Salvation Army World Service Office and Concern Worldwide. Contributors are listed by lesson in the Acknowledgements, and several of these organizations’ logos appear in the document along with a note mentioning that they have not reviewed the document. (While CORE Group did reach out to the original partners, some are no longer around, and in others, we were unable to find people who were available to review the module.)
What changed in the 2026 update
Four technical points were revised to match current WHO and CDC guidance and the peer-reviewed literature.
- A licensed vaccine (Ervebo) now exists, but only for the Zaire strain — not for the Bundibugyo or Sudan strains affecting East Africa, including the current outbreak.
- Two monoclonal antibody treatments, Inmazeb and Ebanga, are now licensed and improve survival, again only for the Zaire strain.
- Guidance on sexual transmission now advises male survivors and their partners to use condoms or abstain for at least 12 months, or until two consecutive negative semen tests. The original guidance said three months.
- Survivor mothers should not resume breastfeeding until two consecutive negative breast milk tests.
The core behavioral messages are unchanged: hand washing, safe greetings, early care seeking, contact tracing, avoiding contact with bodies, and working with the Ministry of Health. As before, practitioners are strongly encouraged to align this generic module with the specific guidance of their own Ministry of Health and country context.
A public health expert working with Impact Global (Tom Davis, MPH), an original co-author of the module, reviewed each change against the source documents before adopting it. The candidate list was generated with Claude Opus 4.7. The changes are summarized in the module’s introduction.
Download the materials
Care Groups Module on Ebola Virus Disease
Nine lessons for community health promotion, revised 2026. The French edition was machine translated with DeepL against a glossary drawn from earlier Care Group manuals, then checked by a fluent French speaker, Rosaura Mesones, who found only small non-technical variances; those were corrected throughout.
Ebola Barrier Analysis: lessons learned
A plain-language summary of findings from the 2014–2016 Ebola Barrier Analysis Compendium (Davis & Srinivasan, eds., 2016), which gathered barrier analysis studies conducted in Liberia and Sierra Leone by Mercy Corps, Catholic Relief Services, and Samaritan’s Purse to identify the real drivers of Ebola-related behaviors. The compendium itself was not revised; no new Ebola barrier analysis studies were available to draw from. The French and Swahili summaries were translated with DeepL.
Corrections
Please send any recommended corrections (and the rationale for each) to Tom Davis ([email protected]) and we will attempt to make changes in the module. However, given the time and budget involved, we are not able to take on major revisions to any of these documents unless an organization can fund the work.
Our thanks to the organizations that produced the originals. This work was contributed in kind; individuals and organizations did not receive funding from USAID, TOPS, or CORE Group.
