Misconception: After a Disaster, Corpses are a Health Threat
Phillip Nieburg
Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies
The devastation caused by the December 26 tsunami was soon followed by reports from many countries of mass graves hurriedly dug and filled with still unidentified corpses of people who had drowned or died of trauma or exposure. This frenetic burial activity was accompanied - and justified - by media coverage solemnly warning about “threats of epidemics from rotting corpses.” The observed rush to bury corpses is probably also motivated in part by fearful beliefs about death and corpses, common in almost every culture.
But do corpses really spread disease? The bacterial process that causes the unpleasant smell during decomposition of dead bodies is putrefaction. In this process, the many types of anaerobic bacteria that normally inhabited the intestine during life begin digesting the intestines and surrounding organs, producing methane, hydrogen sulfide and other chemicals that definitely smell bad. But these bacteria are not causes of epidemic disease and so the threat of disease spreading from the bodies of those killed by trauma or drowning is non-existent. Only when people have died from particularly dangerous infectious diseases such as smallpox, cholera or Ebola virus does extra care need to be taken with disposal of corpses to prevent spread of infection from skin lesions or body fluids.
In addition to not accomplishing public health goals, precipitous mass burial of unidentified bodies both creates great uncertainty about the fate of missing relatives – whose bodies will never be identified - and deprives surviving family members of the closure of culturally appropriate burial ceremonies that can facilitate the coping of survivors.
The goal of preventing the spread of serious infectious disease in natural disaster settings is better served by focusing resources and attention on survivors of the disaster, who may be at increased risk of hypothermia, malnutrition and exposure to contaminated food and water. These living people are much more likely to acquire and spread disease than the dead ones.
Misconception: Light Cigarettes are Not As Dangerous
Norbert Hirschhorn, MD
Lecturer, Global Health Division, Yale School of Public Health
Wrong! As bad or worse. And the tobacco industry knew why from the start. These cigarettes are manufactured with tiny air holes in the paper overlying the filter. You can see this for yourself by carefully cutting the paper away, and shining a pen flashlight against it while holding it up. The air holes have one purpose: to dilute the nicotine and tar containing smoke with ambient air. This fools the Federal Trade Commission “smoking machine” into recording lower levels of tar and nicotine, the numbers you see on the side of the package. Humans don’t smoke like the machine: their lips or fingers cover the air holes, they suck in more deeply to get the amount of nicotine needed, take more puffs, smoke more cigarettes: a process the industry knew about as early as the 1970s – long before public health officials – and which they called “compensation.”
Worse, as tobacco industry documents tell us, such cigarettes were intended to lull the smoker. One document noted that such cigarettes could provide “consumer reassurance” about smoking (emphasis in original), “by claimed low deliveries, by the perception of low deliveries and by the perception of ‘mildness’…so as not to provoke anxiety about health, but to alleviate it, and to enable the smoker to feel reassured about the habit and confident about maintaining over time.” (British American Tobacco, 14 April 1977).
In actuality, “compensation” may cause smokers to take in more tar and nicotine from ‘light’ ‘mild’ cigarettes than from today’s regular cigarettes; this may account for the higher mortality from lung cancer in those persons. Heart disease may also be greater.The only sure way to prevent cancer and heart disease is to never start smoking or to quit as soon as possible.