A mass disaster is an unexpected man-made or natural disaster that causes severe damage and destruction to property and life, such as the recent MH17 crash and India-Pakistan monsoon floods. Mass disaster media coverage tends to focus so much on rescue and recovery operations as well as disaster relief efforts that we barely know of the other aspects of disaster recovery, such as victim identification. It is of vital importance to quickly identify and return the victims’ bodies to their families for proper burial and a sense of closure, but body identification is often associated with many difficulties, especially when bodies are disfigured and the death count is high. Visual identification, when victims’ families are in great mental stress …show more content…
Dental features and a few other characteristics helped to identify 33% of the 63 victims from the British plane as well as 30% of the 103 victims from the Slovenian plane. These being said, dental identification still has its limitations. Firstly, unlike DNA and fingerprint data, dental information are usually not collected and stored in a centralized database. Hence, it can be a tedious and time-consuming process tracking down each victim’s dentist for his/her records. Secondly, for accurate identification, there needs to be a confirmed list of victims and these victims need to have accurate and reliable dental records with their respective dentists. This may not be possible in certain less developed countries where dental awareness is lacking and the dentist-to-population ratio is low. Thirdly, if the scale of the mass disaster is very large (e.g. hurricane or tsunami), dental records may be lost or destroyed while victims’ bodies may be badly mutilated. These circumstances severely undermine the effectiveness of dental identification. Furthermore, children victims cannot be reliably identified with dental features since they have minimal amounts of dental