DAKAR: It has been one of the more bizarre features of a deadly epidemic: a vocal minority in west African society denying that Ebola exists even as family and friends die around them.
The outbreak has cut a swathe through the region, killing more than 1,500 people since the start of the year, yet the work of medics and nurses has been disrupted by angry mobs claiming Ebola is an invention.
A leading social anthropologist who spent a month among communities in the epicentre claims that "Ebola-denial" is perhaps more complex than it first appears.
"When people say that Ebola does not exist, they are rebelling against something," Senegalese university professor Cheikh Ibrahima Niang told AFP.
"They are in situations where they were not consulted and feel that they are treated with a lot of paternalism."
Doctors and nurses -- often from global aid agencies -- are not only fighting the disease, but also a deep mistrust in communities often in the thrall of wild rumours that the virus was invented by the West or is a hoax.
Seventeen Ebola patients in the Liberian capital Monrovia fled from a guarantine centre two weeks ago after it was attacked by club-wielding youths shouting "there's no Ebola" in the latest of a series of such incidents across the region.
"We need to ask what is making them say that," Niang told AFP in an interview at Dakar's Cheik Anta Diop University.
"People have the impression that they are not getting all the necessary information or they do not agree with the prevention measures and medical procedures being imposed on them."
Niang spent July in Sierra Leone's eastern districts of Kenema and Kailahun, on the front line of the fight against the outbreak, as part of a mission for the World Health Organization (WHO).
The epidemic, which emerged in Guinea at the start of the year before spreading to Liberia, Sierra Leone and Nigeria, is the worst Ebola outbreak since the haemorrhagic fever was first identified in 1976.
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