Haiti's Dead Left Where They Lie

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (Jan. 18) -- The dead man on the gurney still had an IV in his hand. Little else set the corpse apart from the piles of garbage accumulating downtown.

The cadaver was one of several tied up in a plastic bag or in a blanket and tossed onto the side of the road. Body parts stuck out amid the rubble of household furniture, hospital supply packaging and chunks of concrete.

A body draped in a baby blue bed sheet at the entrance to the city's Hopital de l'Universite d'Etat d'Haiti warranted not much more than a shrug.

"We expect people every morning to be dead," said Jonathan Gardner, a registered nurse from Santa Cruz, Calif.

The lack of electricity and security concerns make watching patients around the clock imprudent, he explained. Doctors and medical personnel are constantly moving through lines of patients to ensure no one is dying, but once the final act has arrived, the best thing to do is clear the bed for someone new.

On the grounds of the hospital, the acrid smell of the dead wafted into the temporary office of Dr. Neil Joyce, chief medical coordinator for the Los Angeles-based nonprofit International Medical Corps. When Joyce and his team arrived at Port-au-Prince on Jan. 13, a day after the earthquake, they discovered a heap behind the hospital 400 bodies high.

Joyce said he was content to leave the corpses there to give families an opportunity to claim them. Besides, he said, the dead themselves do not transmit disease. Contaminated water supplies are more likely to give rise to outbreaks of illnesses such as cholera, typhoid and diarrhea that all too often follow natural disasters.

"Dead bodies are a social problem, not a public health problem," he said.

The bodies, many of which are still splayed on hospital gurneys, some with bloody bandages around an amputated arm or leg, must eventually be removed for Haitians to retrieve a sense of normalcy, Joyce said. But that is a stage far from the one the country is currently in, he added.

Though bulldozers removed bodies from the grounds of the hospital Sunday, a decaying corpse, splayed and disfigured, was left on a mound of concrete facing the street.

For Joyce and others, it is about attending to the living so that the dead don't continue to pile up.

The Haitian government estimates some 70,000 bodies have been buried in unmarked, mass graves. The death toll is expected to go as high as 200,000.

Anonymous corpses were dumped just past the front gate of a cemetery in the Carrefour neighborhood. Until a burial fee is paid, a caretaker said, there they will remain.

Of the 16 Americans killed or presumed dead, the bodies will be returned to the U.S. when they are recovered. "The ones that have been recovered have been sent," said Jerome Oetgen, a State Department spokesman. "As soon as the rest are found, they will be sent back too."

Robert Lukash, deputy inspector in the New York Police Department emergency service unit, led his 38-member team to a collapsed technical school where a person was thought to be trapped alive. After digging for six hours, they discovered the victim dead. Rather than devote any more time to extraction, the team moved on, leaving the corpse where it lay.

"We will work whenever there's a viable chance of finding survivors," said Lukash. "And at this point, finding survivors is more important than digging out dead people."