Ebola: Due to known payment of allowance, Burial workers dumpes bodies on street

Workers in Sierra Leone have dumped bodies in the street due to failure to pay bonuses for handling Ebola victims.

Residents said up to 15 corpses had been abandoned in the eastern town of Kenema, three of them at a hospital entrance to stop people entering. The head of the district Ebola Response Team, Abdul Wahab Wan, said on Tuesday that the bodies included those of two babies.

A spokesman for the striking workers, who asked not to be identified, said they had not been paid their weekly hazard allowance for seven weeks.


“Displaying corpses in a very, very inhumane manner is completely unacceptable,” said Sidi Yahya Tunis, the spokesman for the National Ebola Response Centre.

Sierra Leone has become the biggest hotspot in the West African Ebola epidemic, which has killed nearly 5,500 people since March.

The outbreak appears to be coming under control in neighbouring Liberia and Guinea, but infection rates have accelerated in Sierra Leone.

A medical source said on Tuesday that another Sierra Leonean doctor, Aiah Solomon Konoyeima, had tested positive for the disease. All seven Sierra Leonean doctors who have previously caught Ebola have died of it.