Papua New Guinea's health authorities have conducted a mass burial of 92 unclaimed bodies, including 40 children, after a video showing overflow from Port Moresby General Hospital's morgue being stored in a shed went viral.
Warning: This story contains details that may be upsetting to some readers.
In the video, bodies were seen stored in what appeared to be an outdoor shed on the hospital's premises, with flies amassing around some of them.
The hospital said among the 92 bodies buried on Wednesday were some that had remained unclaimed since as far back as March.
A Facebook Live video by the local Sunday Bulletin newspaper showed an excavator digging a large hole in which dozens of wooden caskets were buried.
In a statement, National Doctors Association president James Naipao said the hospital's morgue was in a "sad situation".
"The full morgue revealed that relatives of the deceased are not burying the dead," Dr Naipao said.
"The morgue was built for a city's population of 400,000 people at that time, and now, the city's population is well over 1.3 million people."
It's not the first time the chronically overcrowded morgue has led authorities in PNG to conduct mass burials.
A similar burial was performed last year, and another in 2021 during the country's COVID-19 crisis.
The Port Moresby General Hospital said in a statement posted on social media before the mass burial there were 295 bodies in its morgue.
The statement said Wednesday's mass burial was for all unclaimed bodies and body parts from March to July last year.
Another mass burial for bodies from August to December last year is planned to take place in February.
The hospital's acting chief executive Dr Kone Sobi said the morgue had originally been built with a capacity for 64 bodies.
Dr Sobi said that had been expanded with the addition of refrigerated shipping containers, including two in the past four months.
However, the population of the city was growing rapidly, putting huge pressure on the health service.
"Then when we have the proportion of unclaimed bodies that are accumulating for months, it just puts more pressure on the capacity we have at the moment," he said.
Dr Sobi said the hospital planned to add another refrigerated container to the system to provide spare capacity in case one broke down.
Even then, there would still need to be three or four mass burials per year to dispose of bodies that went unclaimed for at least three months.
He said one possible reason why relatives were leaving the bodies in the morgue was cost.
"They could be from remote parts of the country, and it's just too costly for relatives to repatriate the bodies," he said.
The PNG government has been contacted for comment.
Dr Naipao said that the National Capital District Commission should allocate funds to expand the morgue.
"Relatives of deceased should respect the bodies and give a respected accorded burial early, rather than leaving the deceased in the morgue for weeks to months," he added.
