NY Times: 1918 Pandemic-Dealing With the Dead

A Grisly but Essential Issue
Pandemic Plan Skims Over How to Deal With Many Corpses
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/09/AR2006060900078_pf.html?noredirect=on

They brought in steam shovels to dig graves. Caskets were rented -- just long enough to hold a brief memorial service -- then passed on to the next grieving family. The death toll of the 1918 flu pandemic was so overwhelming that the military commandeered entire trains to transport dead soldiers; priests patrolled the streets of Philadelphia in horse-drawn carriages, collecting bodies from doorsteps.

"One of the most demoralizing things was the inability to move bodies out of the home," said John M. Barry, author of "The Great Influenza," the definitive work on the 1918 pandemic. "They just literally stacked up, sometimes for three, four or five days."

Now, with medical experts and government leaders racing to prepare for a potential pandemic, a cadre of mortuary specialists has begun quietly grappling with the grisly but essential question of what to do with the dead if it happens again.   ---CONTINUED---