Health Risks From Dead Bodies
The health risks of dead bodies are dangers related to the improper preparation and disposal of cadavers. While normal circumstances allow cadavers to be quickly embalmed, cremated, or buried, natural and man-made disasters can quickly overwhelm and/or interrupt the established protocols for dealing with the dead. Under such circumstances, the decomposition and putrefaction of cadavers goes unchecked, and raises a series of health, logistical, and psychological issues. After disasters with extensive loss of life due to trauma rather than disease—earthquakes, storms, human conflict, etc.—many resources are often expended on burying the dead quickly, and applying disinfectant to bodies for the specific purpose of preventing disease. This is an inappropriate use of scarce resources and manpower: the health risks from dead bodies in such cases are minimal.
Read more about Health Risks From Dead Bodies: False Risks, Real Risks
Famous quotes containing the words health, risks, dead and/or bodies:
“... work is only part of a man’s life; play, family, church, individual and group contacts, educational opportunities, the intelligent exercise of citizenship, all play a part in a well-rounded life. Workers are men and women with potentialities for mental and spiritual development as well as for physical health. We are paying the price today of having too long sidestepped all that this means to the mental, moral, and spiritual health of our nation.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“The question is whether personal freedom is worth the terrible effort, the never-lifted burden and risks of self-reliance.”
—Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968)
“There couldn’t be a society of people who didn’t dream. They’d be dead in two weeks.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)
“Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads.”
—G.C. (Georg Christoph)