The West African government asked relatives of Ebola victims in Liberia to not dump infected bodies in the streets as the governments struggled to enforce tough measures to curb an outbreak of the virus that has killed 887 people, according to Reuters.
In Nigeria, which recorded its first death from Ebola in late July, authorities in Lagos said eight people who came in contact with the deceased U.S. citizen Patrick Sawyer were showing signs of the deadly disease, Reuters reported.
The outbreak was detected in March in the remote forest regions of Guinea, where the death toll is rising, according to Reuters. In neighboring Sierra Leone and Liberia, where the outbreak is now spreading fastest, authorities deployed troops to quarantine the border areas where 70 percent of cases have been detected.
Those three countries announced a raft of tough measures last week to contain the disease, shutting schools and imposing quarantines on victim's homes, amid fears the incurable virus would overrun healthcare systems in one of the world's poorest regions, Reuters reported.
In Liberia's ramshackle ocean-front capital Monrovia, still scarred by a 1989-2003 civil war, relatives of Ebola victims were dragging bodies onto the dirt streets rather than face quarantine, officials said, according to Reuters.
Information Minister Lewis Brown said some people may be alarmed by regulations imposing the decontamination of victims' homes and the tracking of their friends and relatives, Reuters reported. With less than half of those infected surviving the disease, many Africans regard Ebola isolation wards as death traps.
"They are therefore removing the bodies from their homes and are putting them out in the street. They're exposing themselves to the risk of being contaminated," Brown told Reuters, according to Reuters."We're
In the border region of Lofa County, troops were deployed on Monday night to start isolating affected communities there, Reuters reported.
"We hope it will not require excessive force, but we have to do whatever we can to restrict the movement of people out of affected areas," Brown said, according to Reuters.
