Haiti disasterDead bodies in Haiti do not pose health risk
Health experts say that the haunting scenes of hundreds of dead bodies in the street should not be confused with health risks; dead bodies cannot transmit communicable diseases because viruses and parasites die with the host; the for rescue workers is to wear gloves, handle the bodies with care, and bury bodies before they begin to decompose – and away from sources of drinking water
Few scenes are as haunting as those seen in Haiti these past two weeks, with thousands of corpses blocking the streets and others being carted by bulldozers en masse and dumped into huge graves. The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) now estimates that at least 200,000 people died in the earthquake that devastated the country on 12 January, and the buildup of dead bodies seems practically endless. PM’s Melinda Wenner writes that if there is some good news to be shared, it is that these bodies pose little health risk to Haiti’s surviving residents and to the health workers who are taking care of them.
That dead bodies might be dangerous is a “myth that has been perpetuated time and time again,” says Steven Rottman, director of the UCLA Center for Public Health and Disasters. After almost every major natural disaster in history, survivors and the media have voiced concern that corpses could transmit infectious diseases. If, however, the disasters have struck populations that have, for the most part, been vaccinated against major communicable diseases like measles, “the risk of dead bodies following natural disasters being a source for spreading infectious diseases is very, very small,” Rottman says.
This is because people who die in natural disasters like earthquakes or hurricanes are typically healthy. “They may have other medical conditions, but they’re not living with highly communicable diseases,” he says. “They die from injuries.”
Tropical diseases do exist in Haiti, but once people die, the viruses and parasites that have infected them die too, because these pathogens need a living host. (The bacteria that play a role in body decomposition, on the other hand, do thrive after death, but they are harmless.) As Claude de Ville de Goyet, former director of PAHO’s Emergency Preparedness and Disaster Relief Coordination Program, wrote in the journal The Lancet, “On rare occasions when victims of a disaster are carriers of communicable diseases, they are, in fact, a far lesser threat to the public than they were while alive.”
According to a study published in the Pan American Journal of Public Health in 2004, most of the pathogens that could infect relief workers and survivors — such as hepatitis and tuberculosis — die within a couple of days of their hosts’ deaths. One big exception is HIV, which can live for almost a week; live HIV has been extracted from bodily organs as many as six days post-mortem.
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