The Management of the Federal Medical Centre, Asaba, the Delta State capital, on Wednesday raised the alarm over the large number of unclaimed corpses in the mortuary of the hospital.
The management threatened to give the corpses mass burial within seven days should their relatives and friends fail to come and claim them, describing their abandonment as “worrisome”.
The Public Relations Officer of the hospital, Ogbogu Nnamdi, confirmed that so many corpses have overstayed at the hospital’s morgue without identification, decrying its health hazard.
Nnamdi called on those who may have missing relatives to visit the hospital mortuary based on the fact that the limited space is filled with corpses whose address or relations are not known.
He said the management condemned the manner in which relations and depositors of the corpses indulge in the unhealthy phenomenon, whereby they abdicated their responsibility to care for their late ones.
According to him, relatives are requested to come and identify and claim the corpses within one week, maintaining that corpses not collected within the stipulated period would be given mass-burial.
While threatening that the hospital would be compelled to dispose of these corpses as deem fit as they constitute health hazards in the hospital, Nnamdi said they would be given mass burial.
He said: “The corpses have overstayed and their abandonment constitutes nuisance to the hospital.
“Not that there is no space in the mortuary, but we want to decongest the place the usual way we do it.
“These corpses have not been claimed by their owners within the past one year.
“Those whose relations have been declared missing are equally advised to visit the hospital mortuary to identify the corpses if their relations are there for collection.”