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Four days after Haiti‘s massive earthquake, efforts are under way to bury the dead as thousands of bodies crumpled in the streets of Port-au-Prince lay exposed to the sun or draped in sheets and cardboard.
Throughout the city, people covered their noses from the stench and some resorted to face masks. CNN correspondents in Haiti reported efforts to remove the bodies, including the creation of a mass grave. It’s still unclear how many people have been killed in Tuesday’s earthquake; the prime minister suggested there could be several hundreds of thousands.
CNN’s Anderson Cooper, reporting Friday from a mass grave on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, described seeing hundreds of bodies mixed with garbage in open pits. Some bodies were bulldozed into the half-filled pits.
“These people will vanish,” Cooper said in a phone report. “No one will know what happened to them. That’s one of the many horrors.
“There’s no system in place here. Literally these people here are being collected off the streets, dumped into a dump truck, then brought out here and dumped in the pits,” he said.
The fear of disease is frequently the reason for rapidly burying bodies in mass graves. But contrary to popular belief, bodies do not cause epidemics after natural disasters, experts said.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/01/14/haiti.mass.fatalities.bodies/index.html