Workers employed by Sierra Leone’s Ministry of Health to bury Ebola victims took drastic action this week in a dispute over pay, abandoning the bodies of 15 people in the street, CNN reports.
Some of the corpses were reportedly paraded in front of a hospital while others were dumped on Monday, November 24, 2014, to scare people from gaining entrance into the hospital.
The workers are reportedly being owed seven weeks of “hazard” pay, at $100 per week. This additional pay is meant to be a form of compensation because of the high risks involved with burying Ebola victims, as the virus is spread via contact with bodily fluids.
Meanwhile, the corpses were all cleared as of Tuesday, November 25, 2014, after burial teams working for the Red Cross, rather than the state, were alerted.
Following the protests, a spokesman for the National Ebola Response Center, Sidi Yahyah Tunis, has announced that all the workers that participated in the strike will be sacked.
The current Ebola outbreak is said to be the worst so far in history killing over 4,000 persons in the affected countries.
Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea are the three West African countries worst hit by the deadly virus.
