Demagogue

File this one under "conventional wisdom, upended." You know how every time there is a natural disaster, there's always a rush to perform mass burials for fear of disease? We've seen versions of this paragraph about a thousand times in the tsunami coverage of the past few weeks.

In a field outside Banda Aceh, the Indonesian town devastated by the tsunami in the Indian Ocean, over a thousand dead bodies were unceremoniously bulldozed into a mass grave at the end of December...."We're facing a major health hazard if we leave them lying around," says Azwar Abu Bakar, acting governor of Aceh.

Well, it turns out that may be a crock. Nature reports:

It is widely believed that swift burial is the only way to prevent the spread of diseases such as cholera. But that is a myth, the PAHO report reveals. Cholera does not appear spontaneously in the body of a person who did not have it to begin with. And although harmful bacteria or viruses in a corpse can in theory be spread by rats, flies, fleas and other animals, that doesn't tend to happen in practice.

The temperature of a body falls rapidly after death, so even the most resistant bacteria and viruses die quickly in an animal that has died, according to PAHO. Past experience shows that unburied dead bodies pose a negligible risk to those who do not come into physical contact with them. Handling of bodies by relief workers does, of course, require protective clothing.

So, we basically have subjected the already devastated to further trauma out of plain ignorance. The PAHO also links to a useful myth/fact sheet about disasters. I learned a lot from it.