COURT ORDERS AUTOPSIES AS GAUTENG MORTUARY STRIKE CONTINUES
Desperate families have secured court orders to force postmortems at Gauteng state mortuaries so that they could get bodies for burial as the strike by about 180 forensic assistants drags on with no end in sight.
I know of three court orders brought by Muslim families who are religiously required to bury within 24 hours of death.
It is tragic that the court has to step in because of the pathetic mishandling of this strike by the Gauteng Health Department.
Families were hopeful that the backlog of more than 200 bodies would be speedily cut when military health personnel were brought in to assist last week, but this turned out to be only 7 people.
Pathologists have heroically worked without assistants over this long weekend, but new bodies are coming in all the time and they cannot cope. As there is no fridge space, bodies are being piled on top of each other.