More than 4,000 unidentified bodies lie unclaimed in SA’s state mortuaries, with only a handful cleared by local municipalities for pauper burials.
A body is deemed unclaimed if no-one comes forward to identify it within seven days of death.
The figures were provided by health minister Joe Phaahla in parliament on Wednesday last week.
Responding to questions posed by FF+ MP Philip van Staden, the minister indicated that the situation deteriorated in four of the five provinces for which June data is available, suggesting increasing pressure on state facilities to store the bodies safely. “The morgues do not have enough space. We are sitting on a time bomb,” said Van Staden.
The rising number of unclaimed bodies raises the risk of health hazards and is potentially in breach of government regulations that require persons to be buried within 30 days of death, he said. “I have received complaints of corpses being preserved with ice cubes, and corpses in the morgue for more than two years. The situation is alarming and government must give urgent attention to it.”
Phaahla said in parliament that a third (1,509) of the 4,045 unclaimed bodies reported by the provinces on August 29 were in KwaZulu-Natal, with a further 1,049 in Gauteng. Smaller numbers were reported by the Eastern Cape (315), the Free State (108), Limpopo (353), Mpumalanga (68), the Northern Cape (42), the North West (251) and the Western Cape (350).
The latest figures reflect an increase on those the minister reported to parliament in June for KwaZulu-Natal (1,362), Limpopo (136), Mpumalanga (54), and the North West (174), and a marginal improvement in the Northern Cape (51). At the time he said three mortuaries in Limpopo were already running at overcapacity.
Poor families
In May, he gave parliament a list of state mortuaries that had “space challenges”, and flagged problems in all of the provinces bar Free State and Mpumalanga. Phaahla said there were continuous discussions between the forensic pathology services, SA Police Service and local municipalities about unclaimed bodies, most of which were people who had died after being admitted to public hospitals without identification documents.
DA Gauteng health spokesperson Jack Bloom said the large number of unclaimed bodies at the province’s state mortuaries had held steady for several years, and was in part a reflection of the high crime and road accident rates. Many of the unclaimed bodies in Gauteng were foreigners who did not have family in SA to identify them, while others came from poor families that did not come forward to claim the body because they could not afford a funeral, he said.
The extensive backlogs at the forensic pathology laboratory services, which conduct DNA testing, has contributed to the delays in identifying corpses, Bloom said. Unclaimed bodies are provided with a pauper funeral by local municipalities, at their expense.
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