• 42 unclaimed bodies, including 33 newborns and nine adults, will be buried to reduce crowding at Baringo County Referral Hospital Morgue.
• Residents are urged to collect bodies of loved ones within a week. the bodies have been in the morgue for more than three months.
The bodies of 33 unclaimed newborns and nine adults are to be disposed of in one week by the Baringo County Referral Hospital.
Medical superintendent Dr Garishom Abakalwa said the bodies include six unknown adults and three who have been identified.
The aim is to reduce congestion so the facility can operate efficiently.
“We have just received a court order to dispose of some marked bodies, which have overstayed and congested our facility for the last three months” Abakalwa said on Tuesday.
The Public Health Department is now at at liberty to dispose of the uncollected bodies in any identified public cemetery without further notice.
The mortuary has a capacity of 48 bodies but now has 57 bodies "most of which have been kept or so long," the superintendent said.
He said the disposal would be done any time this week, urging families to hurry, collect the bodies and bury them.
“As a hospital, we uncomfortable and we might soon end up lacking space to preserve new bodies,” Abakalwa said.
He also said long preservation could lead to breakage of the freezers and jeopardise preservation.
“So we have to dispose of the bodies to enable proper circulation of machines and allow the preservation processes to go on normally,” he said.
Abakalwa said some unidentified bodies were brought in by police, having been abandoned "in conflict zones". Some are suicides and some were patients who died in hospital and never were claimed.
He urged the public to collect bodies within a week to reduce congestion.
He said the newborns or stillbirths should be collected and buried swiftly.
"Afterall," he said, "in most cases they do not require arrangement of coffins or family masses,"
Mortuary fees will have to be paid.
(Edited by V. Graham)