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As an infectious disease expert that traveled to Congo in 1995 during the Ebola crisis, I will say that they shouldn't. There is a lot already with the social issue of stigma where the most exhibited act during funerals is hugging. In the United States, when the HIV/Aids infection was at it's peak in the 80's the mostly used recommendation was cremation simply because the disease was still active. As a clinical pharmacy student, we were not allowed in one autopsy because of that.
Blood spatters were a risk so they left the observing for the professionals. Cremation has become the safest way. The Liberian patient Patrick Sawyer was said to have been cremated in Lagos on orders of the Governor. Sawyer;s mother was reportedly demanding her son's ashes.
Now comes word of Ebola with a high fatality rate and one funeral in Serria Leone where 14 women were infected.
Sierra Leone’s explosion of Ebola cases in early summer appears to stem from one traditional healer’s funeral at which 14 women were infected, according to scientists studying the blood of victims.
The funeral, which took place in mid-May, constitutes a “super-spreader” event comparable to one in 2003 in a Hong Kong hotel in which one doctor from China dying of SARS infected nine other guests who spread the virus throughout the city and to Vietnam and Canada.
The funeral was in Koindu, a diamond-mining town across the border from Guéckédou in Guinea, where the outbreak is thought to have begun in December, and the healer was known for treating victims of a mysterious illness that turned out to be Ebola.
The funeral’s central role, which local doctors had anecdotally suspected, was confirmed by geneticists at the Broad Institute of M.I.T. and Harvard who sequenced the virus found in 78 patients treated at Kenema Government Hospital in northeastern Sierra Leone, near the borders with Liberia and Guinea, two countries that are also at the heart of the outbreak.
With Files from the New York Times
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