But health workers said it was a myth that dead bodies constituted an acute health risk after earthquakes.
‘As far as public health professionals have been able to determine, this concern has never been substantiated,’ Steven Rottman, director of the UCLA Center for Public Health and Disasters, told AlertNet.
Rottman said 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.
…’Indiscriminate burial demoralises the survivors and can lead them to be deprived of transferable pension benefits through failure to provide death certificates for pension holders,’ said David Alexander, a specialist in disasters and currently scientific director at the Scuola Superiore di Protezione Civile in Lombardy, Italy.” (ReliefNet via Polymorphously Perverse)
Has anyone read Mary Douglas’ classic, Purity and Danger? It is a treatise on the ways in which what is considered impure or contaminated is socially determined. The boundaries between purity and impurity serve symbolic purposes to maintain social order and coherency. The uncleanliness of the corpse is one of those things. The assertion after every mass disaster about needing to bury the dead rapidly to avoid disease is so automatic and unquestioned that it has always seemed to me that the public health need it meets is more likely in the emotional realm than the infectious disease one.
