People set fire to an Ebola treatment center in a town at the heart of the outbreak in eastern Congo on Thursday after being stopped from retrieving the body of a local man, a witness and a senior police officer said, as fear and anger grow over a health crisis that doctors are struggling to contain.
The arson attack in Rwampara reflects the challenges of health workers trying to curb a rare Ebola virus by using stringent measures that might clash with local customs, such as burial rites. The disease has been spreading for weeks in a region lacking in health facilities and where armed conflict has displaced many people.
The dangerous work of burying suspected victims is being managed wherever possible by authorities because the bodies of those who die from Ebola can be highly contagious and lead to further spread when people prepare bodies for burial and gather for funerals.
That policy can be extremely unpopular with victims’ families and friends, who aren’t given the chance to bury their loved ones.
Damn. I wish there was a way for them to sterilize the body and then hand it over to relatives. However, I’m sure just drowning the corpse in bleach first is just not an option for many reasons. What a mess.
I don’t think that would stop the virus because I doubt the bleach would cleanse the inside. Organs, etc.
I feel like the ideal world would be if there could be collaboration between healthcare workers and members of a community to find a compromise solution that would allow burial practices to be preserved as much as possible, whilst also minimising risk of transmission. I imagine this might look like healthcare workers being involved in the process, rather than simply handing the body over to the family members as would happen if someone died from something other than an infectious disease. It seems like something that should be possible, in theory.
Of course, the problem is that healthcare workers and services are already stretched thin enough as it is, and I don’t imagine they’d have the capacity to even consider doing something like this. I was reading the other day that Trump’s cuts to things like USAID has really impacted the ability to respond to this epidemic
The problem with ebola is that it is contagious and deadly that you would be asking healthcare workers to both endanger their own lives and lives in the community by accommodating any kind of burial rights. You basically have to use impermeable ppe and have no skin exposure at all. You can get ebola just from improperly taking off your ppe, let alone handling a body that’s been bleeding from everyhere possible.