Health officials in Sierra Leone
have expressed fears of a further spread of the Ebola outbreak after
scores of piled-up corpses were discovered in the eastern district of Kono.
The World Health Organization (WHO) stated that it had uncovered a “grim scene” in the diamond-rich area.
The
WHO added in a statement released on Wednesday, December 10 that
within the space of 11 days in Kono, "two teams buried 87 bodies,
including a nurse, an ambulance driver, and a janitor drafted into
removing bodies as they piled up".
The UN agency’s
response team also found 25 other people who had died of the disease
piled up in a secluded section of the local hospital.
Olu Olushayo, a member of the WHO's Ebola response team, said:
“Our
team met heroic doctors and nurses at their wits' end, exhausted burial
teams and lab techs, all doing the best they could but they simply ran
out of resources and were overrun with gravely ill people.”
Authorities
in Kono had earlier decided to put the district on “lockdown” for two
weeks after a sharp rise in cases of the disease was witnessed.
Sierra Leone has now overtaken Liberia as the country with the largest number of confirmed Ebola cases.
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