The body of a dead Ebola victim was seated upright in a taxi, dressed in a T-shirt and jeans with sunglasses and sandwiched between three others for a cross country journey in Guinea, said the head of Guinea’s Ebola response, Dr Sakoba Keita on Monday, May 25, 2015.
The six people found with the body have been put in isolation in prison in Guinea after being charged with travelling with a corpse .
They were stopped at an Ebola checkpoint where security officials became suspicious when the well-dressed passenger remained motionless.
Dr Keita says that it was such actions that accounted for the persistent spread of the Ebola epidemic in the West African country of Guinea.
If after 21 days the arrested persons show no signs of having contracted the virus they will be tried for violating the health emergency laws of the country.
Guinea is battling to control another rise in numbers of new Ebola cases. So far, about 2,500 people have died in Guinea since the Ebola outbreak began in West Africa more than a year ago.
According to the BBC in the capital, Conakry, just nine days ago only nine patients were in Ebola treatment centres countrywide, but now that number has risen to nearly 30 cases.
Ebola victims, due to the nature of the disease, must be buried by Health Workers and immediately, but people who disobey the rules generally do so because they want to conduct the funeral themselves in a specific place, usually the home town or village of the deceased
The present Ebola outbreak is the deadliest in recorded history, it has killed more than 11,000 people. It was initially centred in Guinea’s remote south-eastern region of Nzerekore in early 2014, and from there spread to Liberia and Sierra Leone.
Liberia was earlier this month, declared free of Ebola by the World Health Organization (WHO) as the country had had no new cases in 42 days.
