23260: (Chamberlain) Dead bodies pose no risk of epidemics - WHO (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

     GENEVA, Sept 24 (Reuters) - Dead bodies do not spread disease but mass
burials after disasters, such as this week's killer floods in Haiti, cause
unnecessary suffering to surviving relatives, the United Nations' health
agency said on Friday. Citing mass graves being dug in the Caribbean
island, where over 1,000 people were killed by tropical storm Jeanne, the
World Health Organisation (WHO) said it was a wasteful misconception that
cadavers caused epidemics.
     "It is a myth that regularly surfaces after disasters ... that dead
bodies pose a danger to the surviving population," said Johanna
Larusdottir, WHO senior advisor on health action in crises.
     Outbreaks of diseases such as cholera were more likely to be caused by
the living, with their sewage and effluence seeping into the drinking
water, for example, than by the dead.
     "Infectious agents do not survive long in dead bodies," she told
reporters.
     Denying survivors the chance to bury their dead, however, could cause
them long-term psychological traumas and governments often wasted scarce
resources in unnecessary vaccination programmes and in disinfecting areas
where bodies had been.
     "It often leads to resources being wrongly directed and all kinds of
cleaning and disinfecting programmes," she said.
     In Haiti, police had to restrain angry neighbours and relatives
protesting at mass graves in Gonaives, the northern town that took the
brunt of the storm.