He knows death intimately. As a forensic pathologist in Australia, Stephen Cordner had seen more horror than most ever will, but had not known death to wreak such havoc on the living until he witnessed the devastation being wrought by Ebola in West Africa.

When it kills its victims, Ebola drags the grieving living in its wake. In Liberia, where Professor Cordner recently spent two weeks with the Red Cross, the virus is taking its worst toll after death - still lethal and able to leap from dead bodies to the people attending to the deceased in cramped, poverty-stricken conditions.

Red Cross health workers remove the body of a suspected Ebola victim from a home in Monrovia, Liberia. Credit:REUTERS

"It's around the time you die you have the largest viral load," Professor Cordner said. "The deceased is a huge reservoir of this virus.

"It is an unfolding catastrophe, a disaster as yet beyond the grasp of an international community that needs urgently to intervene on a bigger scale, said the professor, who retired last year as head of the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine but continues as head of its international programs.