Officials in Sierra Leone are now facing strikes from burial workers who claim they haven’t been paid in weeks for burying and attending to victims of the deadly Ebola Virus.
According to Reuters, the two teams who bury 17 to 35 bodies daily claim they haven’t been paid their usual $100 weekly allowance risk in two weeks.
Only a hundred dollars?
Teams in charge of burying the bodies of Ebola victims in two districts of Sierra Leone have gone on strike over the non-payment of their weekly risk allowances, leaders of the group said on Tuesday.
Because the Ebola virus is highly infectious and remains active in the corpses of victims, only specialized teams in protective clothing are allowed to remove and dispose of the bodies.
A strike by the burial teams could worsen the outbreak of Ebola in Sierra Leone, which recorded 121 deaths and scores of new infections in one of the single deadliest days last week. The two districts the teams cover include the capital, Freetown.
Tamba Nyandemoh spoke to reporters about the lack of pay, sayings the specialized group can’t continue to risk their lives for little to nothing.
“We have decided to stop working until they pay us our weekly risk allowance,” Nyandemoh said.”We don’t even care if dead bodies litter all over the city,” another member of the burial team said, requesting anonymity. “All we want is our money. We have been stigmatized in our communities, so let the government try to pay us our money.”
Sierra Leone deputy health minister Madina Rahman says the group has been paid for the last week in September and the money should be available to them by the end of the week. She didn’t decipher the differences between their regular pay or their risk allowances.
With over an additional 121 Ebola victims losing their lives last week in Sierra Leone, the exposure to dead bodies continues to be a danger. To read more about how the virus is spread, click here.
Meanwhile, the U.S. is taking drastic measures with Ebola victims entering the country.
Airports in Atlanta, Chicago, New York, and a few others plan to conduct arrival screenings for people who live in or close to West Africa.
Workers at the Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport and four other airports will be screening the temperature of arriving passengers whose travel originated in Ebola-stricken counties in West Africa, a federal official told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The stepped-up safety measures will begin Saturday at JFK Airport in New York, with the other airports starting the screenings sometime next week, the official said. The other airports include Newark, Dulles, Chicago and Atlanta.
The screenings will include those passengers who begin their travel in West Africa and board connecting flights to the U.S.
Customs have also begun to hand out pamphlets and helpful tips regarding the virus to worried travelers.
It was announced earlier today that Thomas Eric Duncan lost his fight with the virus in Dallas. Duncan was exposed in Liberia after helping a woman with the virus to the hospital.
