Confrontation at burial of Ebola victim

KARAMBI, Uganda -- At last the pickup truck carrying the Ebola victim's coffin arrived. The woman's relatives were relieved. But a small group of young people hissed in anger.

They watched the burial team carefully put on protective suits and gloves, itching for a fight. They grabbed the rope meant to lower the coffin into the grave and used it to block the truck's path. One brandished a stick.

"You will not leave this place if you do not bury the coffin and fill the whole place with soil," he said, wary of contamination if the grave's contents were left exposed. For the handful of young men, fear of contact with the deadly virus was high.

The second-worst Ebola outbreak in history has spread this week from eastern Congo into Uganda, and the brief confrontation as one of the first victims was buried late Thursday was a flash of the community resistance health teams have faced for months over the nearby border.

More than 1,400 people have died since this outbreak was declared in August, and the response has been hampered by misinformation and fear in a region never before facing Ebola. The disease can spread quickly via close contact with bodily fluids of those infected. Wary residents have attacked health workers or fled.

In Uganda, health workers had long prepared in case the virus got past the screening conducted at border posts. Earlier this week, it did.

A family exposed to Ebola while visiting Congo returned home on an unguarded footpath. Some already were showing symptoms. By the time Ugandan authorities who had been alerted by Congolese colleagues found them, a 5-year-old boy was vomiting blood. He was the first to die.

His 50-year-old grandmother, identified by a relative as Agnes Mbambu, was next. Already bleeding, she went straight to a local hospital upon returning to Uganda, relatives and health officials said. On Thursday morning, Ugandan officials confirmed her death.

Burying her took all day and into the night as health workers pulled together the means to do it safely. The need for safe burials conflicts with traditional customs of having loved ones wash and dress the corpse. In Congo, that has led to trouble.

In Karambi village on Thursday, however, the tensions came from waiting and worrying about the disease.

Somber men sat on wooden chairs in a relative's compound. Five women, professional mourners, rested in the grass. The woman's brother, Mbusa Godwin, said they had respected doctors' advice to keep the mourners to a few.

"Everybody feared," another relative, Rusenge Willy, said. "Everybody feared because we feared the disease so much."

But as dusk arrived there was no sign of the burial team, even though Ugandan authorities hours earlier issued a statement saying the woman was already buried. The idea of a nighttime funeral felt disgraceful.

"This is not right," said the victim's brother, Gaspari Kinyama, surveying the burial site among some coffee trees. "At least she is going to be buried here among her people. She has that right."

At 7:30 p.m. the funeral procession arrived. Tensions grew as the burial team changed into protective suits in the glow of car lights. When the team's leader didn't commit to covering the coffin with soil to the young men's satisfaction -- it was not clear why -- the confrontation almost ended in violence.

Ugandan authorities are now trying to keep Ebola from spreading by tracking everyone who had contact with the infected family. At least 98 such people have been identified, the World Health Organization's Uganda office said.