Ebola, Liberia

"The family says the person is not an Ebola patient and they pull them away from the other people. 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."
Vincent Chounse, Community outreach worker, Monrovia, Liberia

"They told us not to bury the bodies. They told us to bury the bodies. They told us to call. But now I am not sure if they are the ones trying to eradicate this virus or to make it grow."
Robert Johnson, 17, Grand Gedeh County, Liberia

A sign lists the "10 Commandments of Ebola" in West Point. (Photo by Tim Freccia)

An epidemiologist at South Africa's University of Pretoria, who travelled to Liberia to help with the Ebola response, claimed to have received reports of people paying bribes to teams sent out for retrieval and safe disposal of the bodies of Ebola victims. The bribes resulted in the teams looking the other way, permitting the custom in the region of family washing, handling, and burying bodies of the deceased to take place as usual.

"Low-level corruption has a high-level impact", said Andrew Medina-Marino.

The teams whose job it is to retrieve dead Ebola victims issue death certificates to families claiming their family members died of other causes, accepting bribes for that privilege. The body is then left behind, for the families to practise their traditional burial procedures. Locals and health workers alike have made allusion to this dangerous practise.

A development that will make it all the more difficult to halt the dread virus from spreading. Since dead bodies of Ebola victims remain the major source of contagion. And the corruption of some of the teams in accepting bribes will ensure that the effort to contain the virus will be hugely unsuccessful, since Liberian funerals include washing the body and retaining it for a wake lasting days.

A health worker holds a poster warning that Ebola is real in the West Point area of Monrovia, Liberia. (Photo by Tim Freccia)

Relatives and friends attend the ceremonial practise to kiss the corpse before it is interred, most often in a family cemetery plot nearby. Another reason for families of the deceased to hope to deny that their loved ones suffered from Ebola, is that the deadly disease carries a social stigma. So avoidance of the reality of the cause of death becomes a point of family honour, one which guarantees wider spread of the devastating virus.

Outside the capital Monrovia, Commissioner Hawa Johnson has stopped issuing burial permits to anyone who cannot produce a death certificate from a hospital giving confirmation of a non-Ebola death. This, after one of her workers came to the realization that body-retrieval teams were offering to sell fake death certificates in the community. Funeral home directors too have taken to double-checking death certificates.

Vincent Chounse, a community outreach worker, claims to have witnessed the corrupt negotiations four times in another township on the outskirts of Monrovia. Teen-age Robert Johnson explained he saw the man who lived next door fall ill. When he died, a team from a funeral home came to collect the cadaver. The family protested and young Mr. Johnson watched as a document certifying the body was Ebola-free was handed over for $150.00.

He professes confusion now, that while the government informs residents they must call body-retrieval teams, the teams fail in their duty to remove the corpses.

A man showing serious symptoms of Ebola was sent to the JFK Ebola treatment center in Monrovia, where he was turned away. (Photo by Tim Freccia)