Ghana: Bodies of Goil fire were not handled with dignity says former health chief

A former Director General of the Ghana Health Service (GHS), Professor Agyeman Badu Akosa has expressed disgust at the way the bodies of those who died in the fire at the Goil fuel station at the Kwame Nkrumah Circle were transported to the morgue.

He was of the view that a similar situation in other countries, especially in more developed countries, would have seen the bodies being wrapped in body bags.

“Anywhere else, all the bodies would have been put in body bags and the body bags would have been appropriately transported to the morgue.”

After last Wednesday’s floods and fire outbreak at the Goil Fuel Station, there were pictures and video footages of the dead bodies being put into the bucket of trucks and being transported to the morgues without any covering.

Prof. Badu Akosa told Citi News, the manner in which the bodies were handled was unprofessional and must not be repeated under any circumstances.

He explained that he was “very distressed the way their bodies were just hurled into the bucket of the pick-ups.”

According to him, it did not “in any way dignify the human beings who had lost their lives under such tragic circumstances. I think as a country, we can do better than that.”

Prof. Akosa pointed out that because the incident was a national catastrophe, “the first thing I would have thought that the morgues will do will be that if they do not have a cold room, they will embalm the bodies.”

“This is almost like a certificate of urgency so what you need to do is to preserve each body in as near the state in which it was brought to the morgue as possible even before relations are brought in to identify the bodies.”

He noted that the families of the victims are already apprehensive while getting into the morgue to identify their relatives “so if you expose more than one body to most people, they will not be actually looking at the body they have come to identify.”

“In most cases, you present the bodies in a manner that they can go from body to body to be able to identify.”

Wednesday 10 June 2015

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