The hardships behind the disease
by Kate Frentzel
Brittany Anderson â16 started out at Luther as a pre-med major with a biology focus. To fill electives, she began taking anthropology courses and was quickly drawn to some of the questions medical anthropology was asking that biology wasnât.

Anderson, pictured here in Freetown, Sierra Leone, in 2018, has taken several trips to the country to study the long-term social and economic impacts of the 2014â16 Ebola crisis.
âWhen you have doctors doing any sort of medical work, theyâll often say, âPatient did not complyâ or âPatient was lost to follow up.â And the questions I had were: What does that mean, why is that happening, and whatâs actually going on there? Those werenât the sort of questions that biology or even a lot of the medical literature was really addressing,â Anderson says. âWhatâs going on in the other parts of these patientsâ lives? Why are some people successful here and other people arenât? I didnât like that so much was written off to personal choice. That felt like it wasnât moving anything forward.â
As a Luther student, Anderson added an anthropology major to her biology major and started pursuing the kinds of questions that mattered to her. In biology, she did an analysis of the available research on glycoproteins in Ebola, which at that point werenât well-understood. At the same time, she wrote her anthropology senior thesis on how the 2014â16 Ebola crisis unfolded across the various regions of Sierra Leone, paying special attention to the social aspects she could glean from reports and articles that detailed timing and why the outbreak happened where it did.
These lines of inquiry would prove foundational to Andersonâs future path, as would the opportunity to be a research assistant to Maryna Bazylevych, a Luther anthropology professor. In 2015, the two women went on a three-week research trip to Ukraine during its conflict with Russia, where they interviewed students about their sense of health and risk. âIn a very practical way,â Anderson says, âthat gave me a lot of experience on what itâs like to be an anthropologist, what itâs like to go out into the field and do research, and whether this is something I actually want to do with my life. And in a pragmatic sense, it meant that when I applied to graduate school, I had some of that experience I could put on applications, which I think really helped to show that I could do this kind of work and be successful.â
Andersonâs research has traced a fairly linear path from Luther to her PhD candidacy in anthropology at the University of Iowa, with the social aspects of the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone as a throughline. During her graduate program, she spent two summers in Sierra Leone investigating the long-term implications for households placed in quarantineâsick or not, sometimes under armed guardâduring the outbreak. She found a lot of economic hardship, social stigma, and emotional trauma.
Anderson was awarded a Fulbright Study/Research Award for 2019â20 to expand on this research. In February, she returned to Sierra Leone to continue tracking the long-term social and economic effects for Ebola survivors. While the COVID-19 pandemic required her return to Iowa in March, in general, she says, sheâs noticed that social stigma seems to have subsided but that economic challenges remainâespecially as government and nonprofit resources have dwindled.
âThese individuals are really having to find their own way of getting treatment and trying to mitigate the chronic side effects of the disease,â she says. âThatâs what Iâm studying now: How are people making choices to pursue one treatment over another, and what goes into influencing those choices? One of the things that anthropology does really well is ask questions like: If somebodyâs choosing this kind of health care, what are they giving up? Whatâs the trade-off for them in terms of making one choice versus another?â
Whatever the answers, Anderson wants her research to have real-world impact. âI want to make sure that whatever I doâwhether itâs in the academic realm or the public sectorâIâm putting something forward that will make a difference for the people Iâm working with. I donât want to write something that gets lost in an academic journal that you have to pay $40 to read. Whatever work I end up doing, I want to make sure that itâs benefiting people.â