Odontologist Forensic as an Aid for Main Disaster

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Disasters are likely to happen at any time or place, they are unexpected events. They can be natural devastation (as earthquake, floods and tsunami), man-made (as terrorist attack and wars) or accident tragedies (as aircraft crashes, fires and groundwater contamination) that result in large destruction or victims (Oxford English Dictionary 2010; Alexander 2006). It can be presented in several ways and length (Parliamentarians 2011). What defines a mass disaster and its proportion it is not the how many death result from it, but the way it happen and the final situation of the dead body (Gonzales et al. 2005). Even though the number of victims (dead and missing people) of some past natural disasters may worry. Some recent events may illustrate it, as the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami which affected in the Philippines in 2004, only in Thailand recorded a number of 5,395 death and other 2,817 missing people, both among citizens and tourists (Beauthier et al. 2009). Other example is the Haiti earthquake in the beginning of 2010, which reached 230,000 (Guha-sapir 2010). Furthermore, depending on where the mass fatality happen, the geographical features may obstruct the search for victims (Tidball-binz 2009). When disasters happen in places of complex access (as a consequence of the event or not), contributes to the delay in the arrival of aid, allowing the submitting of the body to external agents that will soon preclude the remains recognition by visual techniques. This same difficult access also hinders the arrival of teams and equipment that would accelerate the recognition of individuals precession (Zhou et al. 2010). In the event of a mass fatality, it has an extremely importance to do the victims identification promptly ... ... middle of paper ... ..., 2005. Book Review: Management of dead bodies in disaster situations. Traumatology, 11(3), pp.201–203. Tidball-binz, 2009. Management of Dead Bodies after Disasters: a field manual for first responders O. Morgan, M. Tidball-binz, & D. van Alphen, eds., Washington DC. Available at: www.paho.org/english/dd/ped/DeadBodiesFieldManual.htm. De Villiers, C.J. & Phillips, V.M., 2002. Mass disasters. Part 1. Role of the general dentist. SADJ : journal of the South African Dental Association = tydskrif van die Suid-Afrikaanse Tandheelkundige Vereniging, 57(6), pp.239–240. Walsh, F., 2007. Traumatic loss and major disasters: strengthening family and community resilience. Family process, 46(2), pp.207–27. Available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17593886. Zhou, H. et al., 2010. Resilience to natural hazards: a geographic perspective. Natural Hazards, 53(1), pp.21–41.

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