Dead bodies and health risks: Encyclopedia - Dead bodies and health risks

Dead bodies and health risks

After disasters with extensive loss of life due to trauma, much resource is often expended on burying the dead quickly, and applying disinfectant to bodies, to prevent disease.

According to health professionals, the fear of spread of disease by bodies killed by trauma rather than disease is not justified. Amongst others, Steven Rottman, director of the UCLA Center for Public Health and Disasters, said that no scientific evidence existed that bodies of disaster victims increased the risk of epidemics, adding that cadavers in fact posed less risk of contagion than living people.

Obviously this does not apply in the case of a health disaster such as an epidemic where the victims are affected by diseases which can be communicated by dead bodies. And sanitary measures for the survivors of any disaster are necessary to prevent the spread of diseases which affect concentrations of people in bad conditions.

In disasters involving trauma where there is competition for resources, more effort should be spent caring for survivors (improving sanitation, providing clean water or facilities for boiling or otherwise disinfecting water, providing food, clothing and shelter), and less disinfecting and disposing urgently of the dead. Religious and cultural practices, the stench, and the effect on morale must of course also be taken into consideration.

The incorrect notion that dead bodies inherently spread diseases is probably a combination of (a) the incorrect miasma theory of disease: diseases are spread by foul air — you get malaria from breathing marsh air, cholera from breathing foul air from untreated sewage, and diseases from the stench of decomposing corpses; (b) a confusion between normal decay processes and the signs of disease; and (c) the true fact that corpses of those who died from certain contagious diseases do, indeed, spread disease.

There is, of course, always a risk of contamination of the water supply. Just as one should take care to locate toilets/latrines away from sources of fresh water, it is important to locate burial sites or temporary storage sites for cadavers away from water sources (since the cadavers do contain feces and, potentially, the human pathogens that can be found in feces).

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Dead bodies and health risks", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki