HTT News Finds Insufficient Sourcing on Ebola Burial Report

HTT News was assigned a report on why safe burial protocols matter in containing Ebola, tied to a headline from standardmedia.co.ke. The material supplied for that assignment, however, contained no article text, no attributed quotes, no case counts, and no agency guidance — only a link and a one-line summary that restates the headline itself.

HTT News policy requires that every contested or numerical claim trace to source material actually in hand, and that anecdotes, quotes, and specifics not be invented. Ebola burial practices are a serious public-health subject: the World Health Organization and country health ministries have published detailed safe and dignified burial guidance after outbreaks in West Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and that guidance is the kind of primary document this desk would normally deep-link and quote directly. None of that documentation was part of the material provided here.

Rather than reconstruct a story on virus transmission risk, body-handling procedure, or outbreak statistics from memory or inference, the desk is declining to publish a reported piece under this assignment. A corrected brief can run once primary sourcing — the original standardmedia.co.ke article, a WHO or CDC technical guidance document, or an on-record public-health official — is supplied to the desk.

What to watch

• Whether the originating standardmedia.co.ke article becomes available with full text for sourcing.
• Whether WHO or a national health ministry has issued updated burial guidance tied to a specific, named outbreak.
• Whether any attributed case or fatality figures accompany a future version of this assignment.

This note is published for transparency about the gap between the assignment and the material received, consistent with HTT News' sourcing standards.

Why Won't HTT News Fill In the Gaps From General Knowledge?

Safe burial protocol for Ebola is well documented in public-health literature, and a reporter could plausibly guess at the broad outline: minimizing contact with remains, trained burial teams, protective equipment, community liaison work. Guessing is not reporting. HTT News policy draws a hard line between what a desk knows generally about a disease and what a specific assignment has actually verified for a specific outbreak, location, and date. Publishing a plausible-sounding account under a news byline, without the underlying document or quote in hand, would blur that line for readers who have no way to tell confident prose from confirmed fact.

What Would Satisfy the Sourcing Bar Here?

A republishable version of this assignment needs one of three things: the full standardmedia.co.ke article text, a named WHO or national health ministry guidance document tied to a current or recent outbreak, or an on-record statement from a public-health official. Any of those would let the desk attribute figures, quote directly, and link the primary document rather than a bare headline. Until one arrives, the assignment remains open rather than filled with unsupported detail.

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