JEDDAH, 7 December 2003 — Minister of Health Dr. Hamad Al-Manie has said his ministry is poised to act on complaints that corpses are rotting in the Kingdom’s ill-equipped and outdated morgues.
The minister told Al-Watan Arabic daily his ministry was working on updating and expanding morgues especially in major cities.
A flood of official complaints say that morgues around the Kingdom have insufficient capacity to accommodate the rising number of bodies — chiefly of traffic accident victims — and that technical faults mean many bodies begin to putrefy after as little as 48 hours in storage.
Thus up to 50 bodies are kept in unsatisfactory conditions at the Riyadh Psychiatric Hospital morgue, which has a capacity of only 20.
In the Eastern Province, the paper said, Dammam Central Hospital morgue can accommodate 250 bodies. But bodies — some of expatriate workers whose paperwork remains to be settled, some unidentified — are sometimes kept for several months.
At the King Fahd University Hospital morgue in Alkhobar, too, the bodies of expatriates have been kept for six months or more, despite the fact that the hospital only has room for 21 bodies. Staff told the paper the “stench” from the morgue was spreading through the entire hospital.
The director general of Riyadh’s Medical Complex, Dr. Yasser Al-Ghamdi, denied the morgue in his hospital experienced problems. However, he said an expansion project was under way at a cost of SR8.5 million. It was expected to expand the morgue capacity to 300 bodies within the next two months, he added.
