The World Health Organization (WHO) helps train burial teams in Liberia to collect samples from dead bodies to determine cause of death. Dead bodies can be very contagious when it comes to Ebola, but that doesn’t mean that every deceased person has died due to the disease. In order to speed up the process to know the cause of death of each patient, WHO is working closely with the Liberia Institute for Biomedical Research to train burial teams on how to collect an oral swab from deceased patients safely. Since the last week of October, the safe burial teams of the Liberian Red Cross and Global Communities in Montserrado county, including Monrovia, have been safely collecting oral swab samples from people who have died. The collected swab samples are taken to the Liberia Institute for Biomedical Research for further analysis to find out if the deceased patient had Ebola.
