Stuck in a cupboard with my foreign correspondent's clobber of flak jacket and helmet is a pair of heavy-duty green wellies. They made me look like a royal on a grouse shoot, but when covering the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Liberia, they were my most prized possessions. 

For one, you could spray chlorine all over them to fend off the virus. And clumpy as they were, you could make a quick getaway in them - always handy when going out with the Ebola burial squad.

"The world's bravest undertakers", as we dubbed them, had the unenviable task of combing the shantytowns of Monrovia, Liberia's war-ravaged capital, for the corpses of suspected Ebola victims. They were the modern-day equivalent of the “searchers”...