Guilty of #Ebola until proven otherwise? You don’t have to have it to be affected by it: http://t.co/7mBdPuslps pic.twitter.com/rjB9mYp4Ed
— CNN (@CNN) September 24, 2014
There’s no question that countless Liberians are dying because of Ebola even when they don’t have it. There are few functioning hospitals or doctors’ offices. Health care services, weak before Ebola, barely exist; vaccination rates, for example, have plummeted.
“The primary care system here is basically shattered,” says Sarah Crowe, a spokeswoman for UNICEF who is working in Liberia. “It’s an outrage that children are dying of diseases, like measles, that are preventable and treatable.”
Even after death, Ebola — a disease her son says she never had — haunted Kanneh.
Her family heard on the radio that no one should touch a cadaver, no matter what the cause of death. Call in, the announcer on the radio said, and a team from Dead Body Management will come for the body.
It’s simply impractical to test every cadaver for Ebola and sort out who died of what before burial. It would dangerously delay the burial to do so, and would take up too many resources.So the Kanneh family did as they were instructed. On Saturday, the day after her death, a team of five men in white suits, covered head to toe, sprayed Lusa Khanneh’s body with chlorine and buried her
