Ebola crisis deepens in Liberia, corpses abandoned, protesters hit the streets

Apart from having to deal with the Ebola virus epidemic ravaging the country, the government of Liberia now has on its hands, civil unrest as protesters hit the streets Sunday and Monday to protest what they call government’s neglect of the dead.

They claimed the government was leaving the bodies of victims to rot in the streets or in their homes.

Officers of the Police Support Unit (PSU) of the Liberia National Police (LNP) had to fire tear gas to disperse the hundreds of protesters in the St. Paul Bridge Community. And sevearl arrests were made.

The government had warned against touching the dead or anyone ill with Ebola-like symptoms, which include fever, vomiting, severe headaches and muscular pain and, in the final stages, profuse bleeding.

Speaking to AFP, Kamara Fofana, 56, a protestor in the Monrovia suburb of Douala, said: “Four people died in this community. Because the government says that we should not touch bodies, no one has gone to bury them. We have been calling the ministry of health hotline to no avail.”

Miatta Myers said her mother was one of the suspected victims. “Our mother was vomiting… For five days now her body has been in the house. The only way we can get the attention of the government is to block the road.”

But Deputy health minister, Tolbert Nyensuah said the government was doing all it could to collect and properly dispose of bodies as quickly as possible.

He said “We buried 30 people during the weekend in a mass grave outside the city. The government has purchased land from a private citizen and that land will be used to bury bodies,” he said.

In neighbouring Sierra Leone, President Ernest Bai Koroma called for the nation to unite to counter the threat posed by the outbreak. “This is a collective fight. The very essence of our nation is at stake,” he said in a televised address.

Guinea is the hardest hit, with a death toll of 358. Sierra Leone, which declared a state of emergency last week, leads the way with the most reported cases at 646. Liberia has had 468 cases and 255 deaths.

Meanwhile, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that the worst Ebola outbreak in history has taken the lives of 887 people in West Africa as of August 1.

The WHO confirmed that the total number of reported cases in Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Nigeria has surpassed 1,600.