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Sierra Leone: Striking Ebola Burial Workers Dump Bodies In Front Of Hospital

November 25, 2014

Burial workers for an ebola clinic in Kenema Hospital, Sierra Leone, have dumped the corpses of Ebola victims at the hospital entrance to display their anger at unpaid ‘hazard pay’ allowances.

Burial workers for an ebola clinic in Kenema Hospital, Sierra Leone, have dumped the corpses of Ebola victims at the hospital entrance to display their anger at unpaid ‘hazard pay’ allowances.

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The workers, who are on strike, are said to have left two bodies at the hospital entrance and one by the hospital manager’s office.

Kenema is a major city in Sierra Leone and has recorded about ten percent of confirmed Ebola cases in the country.

Two weeks ago a number of Ebola health workers went on strike in the nearby city of Bo to protest unpaid allowances strike to protest unpaid allowances.

Despite signs of progress in reducing the rate of new Ebola infections in Liberia and Guinea, Sierra Leone continues to experience a surge in new infections with about 500 new cases in the last week alone.

The head of The UN Mission for Ebola Emergency Response, Anthony Banbury, has warned that health authorities are losing control of the crisis in certain rural areas which have little to no intervention resources.

"It's clear where there are escalating cases rapidly accelerating the spread of the disease, and where we don't have the response capability on the ground, and that's definitely the case in some places, we're not going make it." Banbury said.

The 2014 Ebola crisis has killed over 5000 people mostly in West Africa, with over 15000 cases recorded to date.