LESS than two months ago, Liberia was celebrating the defeat of Ebola, having gone the requisite 42 days without recording a single case of the disease.
But now, the deadly virus is back in the country, after a 17-year-old boy died over the weekend in a rural town, and body swabs came back positive for Ebola. Two more people linked to the boy have also tested positive and are under quarantine receiving treatment.
The case has health officials baffled, as the boy is not known to have been in contact with anyone who had been to Guinea or Sierra Leone. But authorities suspect the virus could be lurking in animals undetected – the three had shared a meal of dog meat, according to Reuters, a meal that is “commonly eaten in Liberia”.
But even as Liberia scratches its head trying to discover the source of the re-emergence of the disease, Guinea and Sierra Leone have been seeing 20 to 27 cases a week since late May, and the reasons why the disease hasn’t been put out – in Sierra Leone’s case, at least – is more straightforward.
Last week, the country’s National Ebola Response Centre chief executive Palo Conteh admitted he had received reports of disposal teams demanding bribes from families before taking away bodies for disposal.
Complicated and depressing
But it gets more complicated – and depressing. As part of the emergency measures to contain the disease, the rules in Sierra Leone are that all bodies – not just those suspected of dying from Ebola – must be taken away by the disposal teams clad in protective gear, and buried in authorised burial grounds. No exceptions, until the country stamps out the disease.
But disturbing reports have it that rich and powerful people are bribing officials in order to be allowed to bury their dead privately.
According to this story in New Republic, “high profile figures including a member of Parliament, a leading religious figure, the deputy health minister and the mayor of Freetown had all participated in illegal burials.”
Using wealth or influence, people can prevail on the burial teams not to immediately take away bodies for burial, but to have them tested at the mortuary and if they come back negative, the family be allowed to bury on their own.
But body swabs are not 100% accurate, and the worst case scenario is a false negative, where the test says the body is Ebola-free but it actually isn’t – putting everyone at risk, and making it that much harder to conclusively put out the epidemic.
Most egregious is that it totally erodes the public buy-in, when ordinary people see that for the right price, you can skirt the rules; and even when you want to comply, you have to bribe someone to do their job.
