| Online: | |
| Visits: | |
| Stories: |
Pakistan’s heat wave is so deadly that morgues are overflowing
View Photos
A deadly heat wave with temperatures over 113 degrees covers southern Pakistan’s city of Karachi.
A heat wave in southern Pakistan has caused so much death in the country that morgues are overflowing, local medical workers say.
“They are piling bodies one on top of the other,” Seemin Jamali, an official at a government hospital in Karachi, said of the city's overflowing morgues in an interview with Al Jazeera. Anwar Kazmi, an official with the Pakistani charity Edhi Welfare Organisation, told Agence France-Presse that the morgues had “reached capacity.”
Pakistan's heat wave has been described as the worst in decades, with temperatures soaring to 120 degrees Fahrenheit. The high temperatures hit during the Islamic month of Ramadan, when many Muslims were fasting during daylight hours. As of Thursday, reports in the Pakistani media put the death toll at 1,200, though temperatures have begun to fall.
Things got so bad that some morgues have put up signs outside, explaining that they are full.
Photographs taken from inside one morgue show how crowded it has become.
Volunteers try to identify a body among others of those who have died due to an intense heat wave at the Edhi Foundation morgue in Karachi on June 22. (Akhtar Soomro/Reuters)
A man waits, right, while volunteers search for the body of his deceased relative among the bodies of heat wave victims at Edhi Foundation morgue in Karachi on June 22. (Akhtar Soomro/Reuters)
The scale of crowding at the morgues had some major ill effects, Kazmi told Reuters. “The refrigeration unit was not working properly because there were too many bodies,” the official explained.
On Tuesday, the Express Tribune reported that authorities were now attempting to bury unidentified bodies within a day to help deal with the backlog, but gravediggers were taking advantage of the situation and charging double their normal rates.
Credit to Washington Post
http://nunezreport.blogspot.com/
Source: http://nunezreport.blogspot.com/2015/06/pakistans-heat-wave-is-so-deadly-that.html
