Liberia's government is cremating the remains of possible Ebola victims without testing whether they have the virus, leaving relations unaware if they may be at risk of the disease as well.

Current guidelines to stop the spread of the outbreak in west Africa recommend that anyone who dies from an unconfirmed illness be tested for Ebola before the body is disposed of.

This would help health officials to monitor the number of fatalities, and a positive result means the virus may well have been passed on to friends and relations. But, such is the chaos in Liberia's health service, ministry of health undertakers are being instructed simply to take them directly for cremation.

When a reporter accompanied one such team on their collection duties last week in the Liberian capital, Monrovia, the four bodies collected were driven straight to the crematorium at the nearby town of Marshall.

This was despite the fact that some of the families who reported the corpses for collection had done so in the specific expectation that medical tests would be carried out.

Outbreak

The gap in the protocols has alarmed aid agencies, which say it risks fostering a false sense of security among victims' relations, many of whom are reluctant to admit that a loved one may have died from the disease anyway.

"It is very important to keep a record of who has actually died from Ebola and who hasn't, because without reliable data, it is very difficult to assess the spread of the disease," said Lindis Hurum, emergency coordinator with Medecins Sans Frontieres in Liberia.

Since the start of the outbreak in March, health officials across west Africa have fought an uphill battle to get the public to report the deaths. Failure to do so has been one of main reasons for the spread of the illness, as carriers can potentially infect dozens of other people. Under normal guidelines, if a person is found to have died from the virus, health officials try to identify an entire "contact chain" of people to whom it may have been passed.

The lack of a proper testing regime came amid growing concerns about the Liberian government's handling of the crisis. The country's health service was 95pc destroyed during the 14-year civil war that ended in 2003. Officials admit that the Ebola outbreak has caught them unawares.

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the Liberian president, apologised on Saturday for the high death toll among the country's health- care workers who have fought the Ebola outbreak, which has killed nearly 1,000 people in three countries. (© Daily Telegraph, London)

Irish Independent