A
Liberian policeman watches as an Ebola burial team prepares to take
away the body of Mekie Nagbe, 28, for cremation on October 10, 2014 in
Monrovia, Liberia. Nagbe, a market vendor, collapsed and died outside
her home earlier in the morning while leaving to walk to a treatment
center, according to her relatives. The burial of loved ones is
important in Liberian culture, making the removal of infected bodies for
cremation all the more traumatic for surviving family members. (Getty
Images/John Moore)
Health workers
scrambling to contain the deadly Ebola virus in Liberia now have to
contend with an outbreak of corruption among those detailed to collect
the bodies of victims.
The Wall Street Journal reports that retrieval teams are accepting bribes
from families of Ebola victims to issue death certificates that say
their loved ones died of other causes, allowing them to keep their
bodies for a traditional burial.
“The
family says the person is not an Ebola patient, and [the retrieval
team] pull them away from the other people," Vincent Chounse, a
community outreach worker on the outskirts of Monrovia, told the paper.
"Then they say, ‘We can give you a certificate from the Ministry of
Health that it wasn’t Ebola.' Sometimes it is $40. Sometimes it is $50.
... Then they offer bags to them and [the family] carry on their own
thing.” A teenager in Montserrado told the Journal he saw the father of
his neighbor pay $150 for a certificate that said his son's corpse was
Ebola-free.
Government
Information Minister Lewis Brown told the paper his office has received
reports of health workers issuing fake death certificates, but he added
that no burial team has "a capacity to go and issue certificates."
According to the World Health Organization, more than 4,000 Ebola cases have been reported in Liberia, resulting in 2,316 deaths since the outbreak began.
But local health officials say the numbers are not adding up.
“We
are not receiving the amount of community calls that we should be,”
Agnes “Cokie” van der Velde, who oversees body collection teams for
Doctors Without Borders, told the paper.
The
grim task of removing bodies infected with Ebola is critical, health
officials say, because the dead are a major source of contagion.
Working
against them is the stigma associated with Ebola among West Africans,
and the desire for the family to have a traditional burial. Often,
communities will assume that one person infected with the disease means
his or her entire family is infected and therefore is discriminated against and shunned.
Van
der Velde said while she was not aware of body retrieval teams
accepting bribes, they are nonetheless in a tricky position. “We try to
be very respectful, but in the end what we’re doing is taking their
loved one, zipping them in a bag and taking them away." http://news.yahoo.com/ebola-families-bodies-bribes-153423993.html