ArticleConflict and health2021
Gender-based violence and infectious disease in humanitarian settings: lessons learned from Ebola, Zika, and COVID-19 to inform syndemic policy making.
Article in Conflict and health, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 25 citations in OpenAlex.
- Gender-based violence syndemics in global health: A systematic review.Social science & medicine (1982) · 2025Pooled it
- Making progress on One Health policies and programmes: Perspectives on community engagement and gender equity in four West African countries.One health (Amsterdam, Netherlands) · 2026Article
- Outbreak preparedness for women and girls in low- and middle-income countries: a qualitative study.BMC global and public health · 2026Article
- Reproductive Health Outcomes Associated With Domestic Violence Among Iranian Women During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Cross-Sectional Study.Health science reports · 2026Article
- Metaphors of Health System Resilience as Tools for Preparedness Imagination.Health care analysis : HCA : journal of health philosophy and policy · 2026Article
- Strengthening and sustaining gender-based violence (GBV) coordination in emergencies: a synthesis of practitioner-driven, globally applicable recommendations.Conflict and health · 2026Article
- Beyond COVID-19, the case for collecting, analysing and using sex-disaggregated data and gendered data to inform outbreak response: a scoping review.BMJ global health · 2025Article
- Sexual health of Syrian women in protracted forced displacement: the syndemic interplay of violence, war trauma, poor mental health and food insecurity.BMJ public health · 2025Article
- Using a Syndemics Perspective to (Re)Conceptualize Vulnerability during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Scoping Review.Tropical medicine and infectious disease · 2024Article
- The association between emotional and physical intimate partner violence and COVID-19 vaccine uptake in a community-based U.S. Cohort.Preventive medicine reports · 2024Article
- Government responses to COVID-19 and impact on GBV services and programmes: comparative analysis of the situation in South Africa, Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria.Sexual and reproductive health matters · 2023Article
- "The pandemic only gave visibility to what is invisible": a qualitative analysis of structural violence during COVID-19 and impacts on gender-based violence in Brazil.BMC public health · 2023Article
- Digital Technologies to Enhance Infectious Disease Surveillance in Tanzania: A Scoping Review.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Community-engagement in research in humanitarian settings.Frontiers in public health · 2023Article
- Environmental health, COVID-19, and the syndemic: internal medicine facing the challenge.Internal and emergency medicine · 2022Review
- "International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
- Conceptualizing COVID-19 syndemics: A scoping review.Journal of multimorbidity and comorbidityArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundThe impacts of infectious disease outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics are not gender neutral. Instead, infectious diseases and gender-based violence (GBV) mutually reinforce each other. Women and girls in humanitarian settings are disproportionately impacted as crises exacerbate gender inequality, violence, and community transmission. A syndemic model of infectious disease and GBV draws attention to their critical linkage, enabling more effective approaches to address both infectious disease transmission and GBV prevalence. MAIN BODY: Implementation of infectious disease control measures have been consistently absent of critical gender considerations in humanitarian settings. We drew learnings from Ebola, Zika, and COVID-19 to highlight how women and girls living in humanitarian settings have faced bi-directional syndemic vulnerabilities between GBV and infectious disease. Our findings indicate that Ebola, Zika, and COVID-19 exacerbated GBV risk and experience of GBV increased community transmission of these infectious diseases. Moreover, we identified a failure of existing policies to address this mutually deleterious linkage. Thus, we advocate for policymakers to ask three foundational questions: (i) What are the gendered bi-directional risk pathways between infectious disease and GBV?; (ii) How can we act on the gendered risk pathways?; and, (iii) Who should be involved in designing, implementing, and evaluating gender-sensitive policies?
conclusionOur syndemic policy framework challenges existing thinking on a neglected issue that disproportionally impacts women and girls. By offering foundational guidance to address and thwart the syndemic of infectious disease and GBV in humanitarian settings, we endeavor to proactively and holistically address the reinforcing linkage between GBV and current or emergent infectious diseases.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.