City Hall To Bury 97 Unclaimed Bodies After Seven Days

Nairobi County’s Mbagathi District Hospital mortuary through the Nairobi County government is appealing to members of the public to collect bodies of their loved ones for burial.

A total of 97 dead bodies (56 males and 41 females) are said to have been abandoned at the hospital’s morgue and have been lying there since 2015.

The hospital management had earlier announced that they would reach out to police to help with the identification process, and compile a list of the names of bodies that would remain unclaimed to the county government for them to be published in a gazette notice.

It is to this effect that the County government of Nairobi issued a public notice for the collection of dead unclaimed bodies from the Mbagathi hospital.

In the notice, the county government gives a seven-day grace period for members who might have lost their loved ones to collect the bodies, failure to which the county will have the hospital release the bodies for burial in a mass grave at Langata cemetery.

“The Nairobi County Government would wish to ask members of the public to identify bodies of the persons named below and collect them for burial within seven days. Unclaimed bodies will be disposed of professionally,” reads part of the notice.

Kenyan public hospital mortuaries have for a long time been facing the crisis of having to preserve dead unclaimed bodies which causes them to incur losses as a result and causing a pile-up at the morgue.

According to the Public Health Act, a body should be persevered in the morgue for a maximum period of two weeks, after which it is released to be disposed of.

The Rift Valley Provincial General Hospital Mortuary is facing the same problem and has sought judicial authority to have twenty unclaimed bodies lying in the facility buried professionally.

Public Health Chief Officer Samuel King’ori said that the search for relatives to claim the bodies left in many public morgues has not borne fruit.

“So many bodies are left unclaimed in our preservation facilities causing an unhealthy pile-up and yet the preservation costs continue to rise. Once we get a court order, the twenty bodies left at the Rift Valley Provincial General Hospital Mortuary for three months will be interred at Nakuru South Cemetery,” said Mr. King’ori.

According to the ministry of health, that is the situation in most public health facilities as thousands of unclaimed bodies are disposed of.

Between2003 and 2006, City mortuary and Kenyatta National Hospital Mortuary disposed of more than 5,000 bodies and lost millions in terms of preservation fees.