CONTACT:
Cary Gross
Yale School of Medicine
Internal Medicine
333 Cear St
PO Box 208025
New Haven, CT 06520-8025 United States of America
+1-203-688-8588
+1-203-688-4092 (fax)
cary.gross@yale.edu
Ensuring death with dignity after disaster
When a major natural disaster strikes, one of the tasks is to manage the dead efficiently but with dignity. Lessons can be learned from what happened after the South Asian tsunami in December 2004. An international group of researchers has studied what took place and has issued recommendations as to what should be done in future catastrophes.
Over a quarter of a million people died in the tsunami. There is very little agreement about the best way to handle and identify so many bodies. Most guidelines are based on experience gained from transport accidents and from terrorist incidents. These guidelines may not be relevant; for example, natural disasters often cause many more deaths than transport accidents or terrorist attacks. It is important for survivors that the bodies of the dead are handled with respect and that the dead are identified so survivors know what has happened to missing relatives. However, at the same time many people are afraid of what the effect of many dead bodies might be on the living; one belief is that dead bodies are a source of disease. Such a belief can lead to the inappropriately rapid burial of bodies before identification has taken place.
Researchers from the UK, USA, Thailand, Indonesia and Sri Lanka set out to study how the bodies were recovered, identified and disposed of, and what, if any, were the health effects of the large number of bodies on survivors. They interviewed key people involved in the handling of the dead in Thailand, Indonesia and Sri Lanka.
There were a huge number of people and agencies involved; for example, in
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Contact: Andrew Hyde
ahyde@plos.org
44-122-346-3330
Public Library of Science
5-Jun-2006