• NMS Health Director Dr Fredrick Oluga said 57 bodies were at the City Mortuary, 11 at the Mama Lucy Funeral Home and two at Mbagathi Hospital Funeral home.
• 30 bodies at City Mortuary had been at the morgue since last year November and the rest were cases from this year.
Image: COURTESY
Kenyans have a week to identify and collect 70 unclaimed bodies lying at the three city morgues, failure to which they will be interred by the Nairobi Metropolitan Service.
In a public notice on Wednesday, July 28, 2021, NMS Health Director Dr Fredrick Oluga said 57 bodies were at the City Mortuary, 11 at the Mama Lucy Funeral Home and two at Mbagathi Hospital Funeral home.
“Pursuant to Public Health Ac Cap 242 (Subsidiary Legislation Public Health Mortuaries Rules, 1991), interested members of the public are asked to identify and collect the named bodies within seven days, failure to which the Nairobi Metropolitan Services will see authority for disposal,” reads the notice.
Cap 242 of the Public Health Act says an unclaimed body should be removed from a mortuary within two weeks or else it is disposed of in a mass grave after public officers obtain a court’s permission.
At City Mortuary, 44 bodies were unknown with 13 having been identified and their names published.
Thirty bodies had been at the morgue since last year November and the rest were cases from this year.
Twenty-one deaths were sudden, five drowned, eight from accidents, four classified as natural deaths, nine from murder and six died as a result of mob justice.
Two cases were from suicide, one from fire and one body was brought to the morgue decomposed.
At Mama Lucy Funeral Home, all the 11 bodies were male with the youngest aged 25 with the oldest 48 years.
At Mbagathi, the unclaimed bodies were of a 40-year-old male and 86 year old female.
Public health facilities have been expressing concern over the increasing number of unclaimed bodies across different health facilities with Nairobi, particularly City Mortuary, being the worst affected.
The notice comes eight days after the public were also appealed to identify and collect 418 unclaimed bodies lying at the Kenyatta National Hospital (KNH), failure to which they will be interred by the government.
Last week, the Kisumu County government disposed of 61 bodies that had been lying in the county’s various mortuaries in mass graves in various public cemeteries after obtaining a court order giving a go-ahead for the process.
Between 2003 and 2006, the City Mortuary disposed of 2,500 unclaimed bodies. The number for KNH was 3,000.
In 2006 Kenya's two main public mortuaries (City Mortuary and Kenyatta National Hospital mortuary) lost millions in uncollected revenue from unclaimed bodies.
In about five months, City Mortuary and Kenyatta National Hospital mortuary disposed of over 1,500 unclaimed bodies, losing about Sh5 million.
In October 2019, City Court chief magistrate R. Oganyo allowed City Hall to dispose of 97 unclaimed bodies at Mbagathi Hospital.
In March this year, NMS called upon members of the public to collect 119 unclaimed bodies at various city morgues.
The bodies had accumulated at the morgues between May and October 2020.