Four months after Super Typhoon Haiyan hit the Philippines, bodies are still being found, though the government hasn't updated the death toll of 6201.
Bodies are still being found under the wreckage almost four months after Super Typhoon Haiyan ravaged the Philippines as survivors struggle to rebuild their lives.
The government's confirmed death toll of 6201 has not been updated for a month, as officials investigate whether the recently-discovered corpses are among the 1,785 listed as missing.
UN undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs Valerie Amos recounted the shock of discovering the dead during a visit on Wednesday to the devastated central city of Tacloban.
"As the debris is cleared, they are finding more dead bodies. We experienced that for ourselves," she told reporters.
Amos visited Tacloban to inspect the progress of the UN-aided rehabilitation effort and check on the condition of survivors of one of the strongest typhoons ever to hit land.
The government's National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council confirmed bodies are still being found.
"Sometimes they find two or three a day, then there are days where they find none," its spokesman Reynaldo Balido told AFP.
The latest casualty figures were a month old and did not reflect any subsequent corpse retrievals as the authorities work to reconcile the numbers, he added.
Balido said residents have learnt to adapt to the sight of newly found corpses.
Haiyan raked across the central Philippines on November 8 last year, wrecking 1.1 million houses and displacing more than four million residents of some of the country's poorest provinces according to the UN.
The worst damage was inflicted by huge tsunami-like surges of seawater into Tacloban and other coastal communities.
Thursday 27 February 2014
http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2014/02/27/corpses-still-being-found-after-haiyan
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