Hospital officials dump bodies at site

By Lan Tian in Beijing and Zhou Lihua in Hubei (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-06-26 09:33

The bodies of eight people who died at a Xiangfan hospital were dumped at a construction site by hospital officials who apparently could not find any of their living relatives.

On Tuesday, a worker at the construction site in Xiangfan found the bodies, a spokesman for the publicity department of Xiangfan Party Committee told China Daily Thursday.

In addition to the eight bodies - one woman, one man and six fetuses - police also found a bag containing three human lower limbs at the site.

Police said the bodies and human parts were not decomposed when they were found, meaning that they were buried there fairly recently.

The bag containing the body parts had the logo of Xiangfan Central Hospital. A hospital spokesman later said that its morgue staff buried two unclaimed adult bodies and six aborted fetuses at the site on May 19.

One person died in January, and the other in March, but no one had claimed their bodies, and they had been kept in the hospital morgue since then. No information was available about the fetuses.

Local government officials have ordered the public security department, health bureau and civil affairs section to investigate the case.

Founded in 1949, the hospital is the city's biggest and best-equipped.

In recent years, media have often reported that hospital morgues across China hold too many unclaimed bodies, which take up a large amount of space, waste hospitals' money, and reduce working efficiency in the morgue.

However, Tan Xiaodong, a professor with school of public health at the Hubei-based Wuhan University, said the hospital dumping the unclaimed bodies was not to reduce the cost or to avoid paying for the cremation.

The reason was that China has no law or regulations stipulating how to handle unclaimed bodies, he said.

"But despite the absence of the law, many provinces actually have their own way to deal with unclaimed bodies," he said.

Hospitals in Hubei, for example, usually dispose of unclaimed bodies after permission is granted by local public security and health departments, he said.

Hospitals in Beijing have to report to the public security department before disposing of any dead bodies, an official with the Peking Union Medical College Hospital said Thursday.

"Government should draft relevant law as soon as possible to clearly stipulate it," Tan said.

He suggested the law should have a stipulation that requires the public security department to keep a sample of the decedent's DNA to help people who may have lost touch with family members later confirm the death of a relative.

The case was still under investigation as of Thursday.