[X] "Agrobiodiversity and Monoculture Homogenization in Agri/Culture" (UP Forum, 2011). [X] "The Fight for Education as Dress Rehearsal" (UP Forum, 2011). [X] "Community Sterilization and the Cataclysm" (UP Forum, 2012). [X] "Pamana at Pagkalinga ng mga Inang Makabayan" (UP Forum, 2012). [X] "Beyond the Bark: Reexamining our Roots" (UP Forum, 2012). [X] "Enabling Law Disabling 'Small Dictatorships'" (UP Forum, 2013). [X] "Power Switch: Reconsidering Renewable Energy" (UP Forum, 2013). [X] "Indigenous Research: Settle to Unsettle, Learn to Unlearn" (UP Forum, 2014). [X] "Fortun, Forensics and the Yolanda Aftermath: Recovery, Storage, System Restore, Repeat" (UP Forum, 2014). "General Education at Globalisasyon: Isip, Salita at Gawa Para Kanino?" (UP Forum, 2014)
magbabago ang listahan sa bawat post. simulan na natin.
Fortun, Forensics and the Yolanda Aftermath
Recovery,
Storage, System Restore, Repeat
The absence of a system—responsible for elaborately
defining deaths to be investigated, identifying who will examine them and
determining how the examiners conduct the investigation–results in misidentification
and loss of bodies, stolen property, extortion by funeral parlor personnel,
fake death claims and claimants, among numerous problems. This observation was
discussed in “Managing the Dead in a Mass Casualty Incident,” excerpted by UP Padayon Reports (2011) from Dr.
Raquel del Rosario-Fortun’s book Management
of the Dead During Disasters: A Manual for the Philippines (2007),”
The absence of such a system was evident in the
aftermath of typhoon Yolanda. Another obvious consequence was the national
government’s downplaying of the number of casualties.
In
her article, Dr. Fortun said an on-call
Philippine Disaster Mortuary Response Team (DMORT) with pathologists, dentists,
anthropologists and radiologists was organized
to professionalize the handling of the dead. Among the factors the team had to
consider were: the type of incident, estimated number of fatalities, probable
condition of the remains, location of the incident, personnel, and funding.
Initial
Processes: Recover and Store
Remains shall be retrieved as soon as possible
to improve the accuracy of identification and “lessen the distress among the
living,” said Fortun. Site layout prior to the incident shall be taken into
consideration so that one can approximately determine where best to look for
passengers, occupants or residents. The affected area shall be mapped so that a
systematic and expeditious search plan can be enforced while ensuring that places
already searched are marked to avoid useless repetitions.
Fortun
mentioned a number of means to document relevant details. These included drawing
a simple sketch of the scene and marking the spot where the bodies are
recovered; taking photographs or videos; and mapping via GPS (Global
Positioning device). Shots shall include over-all shots and close-ups, if
possible, noting the date and time the image was taken. The documentation
procedures depend on the availability of resources.
Separated
body parts and items (such as evidence and property) shall be tagged as “PARTS”
and “PROPERTY,” emphasized Fortun. Should the respective parts and/or the items
obviously belong to a particular body, those shall be placed with that body.
Otherwise, the location in reference to the nearest body/bodies must be noted. In
collecting and transporting remains, property and evidence, Fortun said that a
general principle in securing physical evidence is to ensure against loss,
contamination, tampering, switching or damage; hence, remains shall not be
exposed and must be kept covered at all times.
As
regards “contracting infectious disease from dead bodies,” Fortun said that the
risk is small and [these] basic measures alone [i.e. wearing heavy duty gloves
and boots, hand washing and a change of clothes after handling remains] should
be enough. She further said that advantages in wearing masks are largely psychological,
and hence should not be encouraged especially because it will not block the
inevitable unpleasant smell from decomposing remains which do not pose a health
risk.
Ideally,
there shall be “refrigerated container vans” with temperature at four degrees
centigrade “to preserve the remains while awaiting examination and release,”
Fortun said. However, in reality, remains quickly decompose due to the absence
of refrigeration; thus it is practical to properly mark and accurately tag
temporary burial or embalming, which postpones decomposition once chemical
preservatives are injected into the body.
Post-Yolanda
Identification: Differences
In an
interview with the UP Forum, Dr.
Fortun, forensic pathologist, and UP College of Medicine professor who headed
the post-Sendong forensics team of UP Padayon in 2011, recounted how the Department
of Health (DOH), under the command of the Office of the President, organized a
team to manage the identification of bodies in the affected areas in the
Visayas.
The team was led by Dr. Chito
Avelino, for “Oplan Tamang Libing” intended to manage dead bodies post-Yolanda.
Fortun said, “I was consulted by DOH on Nov. 14, together with foreign World
Health Organization (WHO) consultants. The decision on how to organize the DOH
response team including the people involved, the procedure on how to do the
postmortem examination and antemortem information gathering, what logistical
supplies were needed, etc. was a collaborative effort among the DOH, the WHO
and me. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the Philippine
Red Cross (PRC) were also represented in our Nov. 15 final meeting.”
With
pressure brought about by “urgency, magnitude, limitations,” the team had to
act fast, regardless of the seemingly inversely proportional total of resources
and remains. “All the remains would therefore undergo basic examination,
inventory, tagging and orderly burial. The idea was to record as much
postmortem information as possible, then bury the bodies without compromising
identification,” said Fortun. The places where bodies were retrieved were documented under the DOH-WHO system, followed
by individual bagging, sequential tagging and descriptive and photo-documented physical
examination.
“Initially
the collection point for Tacloban bodies was a small cemetery in Barangay
Basper. Upon our recommendation the LGU identified a site for the collection,
examination and burial of the bodies in Barangay Suhi. We started to bury the
remains already examined in an orderly manner, mapped out in trenches, to
facilitate exhumation of particular bodies for later identification.” After
recovery and storage, the next step was identification, which was carried out
by “comparison of postmortem and antemortem.”
Commencing
on Nov. 18, ten days after the incident, these examinations were “limited to
determination of sex and general age category (infant, child, adult);
documenting clothes, jewelry, other personal effects like wallets, phones;
checking for tattoos.” The team recorded the information in “a much simplified,
short form—maximum of 3 pages.” In contrast, the National Bureau of
Investigation (NBI) preferred the “INTERPOL way. It entailed detailed
postmortem exams per body—the forms are around 15 pages long, complete with
dental charting—best done by a dentist, and DNA sampling—best is to saw off a
section of the thigh bone or extract teeth.”
Fortun said
the INTERPOL way is “very tedious and
time-consuming—not to mention the packaging, labeling, and storage of the
samples, though not necessarily more accurate than the DOH-WHO way” and that “NBI
merely mentions DNA sampling, not actual testing.” She added, “The insistence
of the NBI—and the PNP which is tasked
to take charge of ‘man-made’ disaster victim identification or DVI—on using the
INTERPOL protocol is not practical. It is also not universally accepted. First-world
countries with death investigation systems in place (e.g. US, UK, Japan) do not
rely on the INTERPOL system. The emphasis on DNA in the identification of
victims of mass disasters in 3rd world countries is also misplaced.”
Fortun
expressed uncertainty whether the NBI’s
decisions were geared “toward understating or delaying the official death toll.”
She “believe[s] it is more of institutional arrogance, insisting that they are
in charge even if they are undermanned, minimally trained and ill-equipped for
the job.” She said that the NBI attended the aforesaid Nov. 15 DOH meeting. “The
NBI officer-in-charge and their chief medico-legal doctor” were present when
the group agreed that they “would be assigned to different places in the
Visayas and were to work separately,” given that “there were so many dead.” She
further said, “ the NBI had no disaster victim identification (DVI) system in
place when the DOH team started work in Tacloban on Nov. 18. Then on Nov. 22,
they practically grabbed what the DOH had set up and they just had to work also
in Tacloban. There is no news of the NBI
examining the dead in other places.”
Pre-Yolanda
Propositions: Reprise
“The
unpleasant encounter with the NBI over forensic matters such as DVI is not new
or unique to the DOH Tacloban experience,” said Fortun, since it had happened
“when UP sent a forensic team to help Iligan with its dead, post-Sendong. The
same thing happened although the confrontation was slightly more civil [then].
The 3-day trip to Iligan in 2011 was a waste of time and resources,
forensics-wise.”
Despite existing documents
with relevant information for capacity-building and post-disaster measures, it
seems that the same mistakes are repeated because recommendations of field
experts and concerned stakeholders were not applied and tested. This is perhaps
due to limited resources, the aforesaid “institutional arrogance,” and the inadequate political will of the national
government to institutionalize new, better systems.
“Every
time we encounter a disaster with multiple casualties—and they are occurring
with alarming regularity-- we panic and scramble when confronted with so many
dead bodies. We do not learn from each incident but merely react, come up with
some semblance of a management-of-the-dead response and once the bodies are
buried—typically unidentified, they are soon forgotten,” said Fortun. She reiterated
her suggestion in her 2007 article that calls for the institutionalization of a
DMORT, “preferably within the more general context of finally setting a
national death investigation system..The present ‘system’ merely assigns ‘natural’
disasters to NBI and the ‘man-made’ ones to PNP. Neither of them is up to the
task. Ironically this is according to DOH Administrative Order 2007-18, from the institution itself which is supposed
to be in charge of the dead.”
“Death is
a health concern and therefore death investigation—identification, cause and
manner determination—falls under the mandate of the DOH, not the police or an
agency like the NBI. This is how it goes in developed countries,” said Fortun.
“It was such a pleasant surprise therefore for DOH to actually organize a
forensic team for Yolanda’s dead. I very willingly helped when asked to. But it
was such a disappointment that they dissolved the team they organized after
only a week. Later I was told it was upon orders of the OP. Too bad even the
dead like the survivors were victims twice over, of the strongest storm ever
recorded, and petty politics.”
Perhaps
the post-disaster tragedy—of downplaying the effects of the actual disaster for the sake of the
government’s popularity ratings—is beyond “petty politics.” With this
mismanagement comes criminal injustice, which perpetuates, with the issue of
overpriced bunkhouses, among many overlapping layers of corrupt practices that
cost human lives. This post-disaster tragedy of the Aquino government’s
indolence and insensitivity merits prosecution. If we go by Oxford
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