Health workers leave up to 15 Ebola victims'
bodies at hospital entrance in Kenema city in
protest over pay.
Burial workers in Sierra Leone have dumped bodies
in the street outside a hospital in protest at
authorities ' 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 .
Authorities acknowledged the money had not been
paid but said that all the striking members of the
Ebola Burial Team would be dismissed .
"Displaying corpses in a very , very inhumane
manner is completely unacceptable, " said Sidi
Yahya Tunis , the spokesman for the National
Ebola Response Centre .
He added that the central government had paid the
money to the district health management team .
"Somebody somewhere needs to be investigated
(to find out ) where these monies have been going, "
he told Reuters news agency .
Healthcare workers have repeatedly gone on strike
in Liberia and Sierra Leone over pay and dangerous
working conditions . Two weeks ago , workers
walked off the job at a clinic in Bo in Sierra Leone.
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 .
The head of a special UN mission on Ebola
acknowledged on Monday it would not meet the
target of containing the outbreak by early
December.
China said on Tuesday it would step up its Ebola
response.
"More then 600 medical staff and public health
experts have been sent to the affected countries in
western Africa and the number is estimated to
grow to 1 ,000 in the coming months, " said Cui Li ,
Chinese vice minister for national health , at the
opening of an Ebola Treatment Unit in Monrovia.
Despite pledges of hundreds of millions of dollars
in aid, and the deployment of US and British
troops, the weakness of healthcare systems and
infrastructure in the affected countries has
hampered the fight against the worst outbreak of
the Ebola virus on record.
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