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Requiring professional handling of dead people has certain benefits. It reduces the chance of infection (a lot of people in West Africa caught Ebola at funerals
by kijin 11y ago
Requiring professional handling of dead people has certain benefits. It reduces the chance of infection (a lot of people in West Africa caught Ebola at funerals last year), and it probably also makes it more difficult for suspicious deaths to go unnoticed. Poisoned your uncle to get his money? The funeral director might call the police.
So it makes sense for professionals to get involved at least in the early hours after death, even if only to ensure that the body will not trigger an epidemic. But most of the rest of what we think of as a funeral is just a bundle of arbitrary practices -- some traditional, others invented and popularized by hospitals and funeral homes who profit from them. There is no reason to enshrine them in law. Families should be free to do as they please with their deceased, as long as they don't pose a threat to public health or interfere with a criminal investigation.
- shiggerino 11y agoOnly an infinitesimal number of stiffs are actually infectious. Most of them are in West Africa and died of Ebola. So it's not really a concern in most circumstances.
- kijin 11y agoConsidering how anti-vaxxers managed to bring back diseases that we once thought virtually extinct, I wouldn't be so sure about letting people keep corpses in their living room without some sort of professional supervision. Public health in developed countries doesn't simply maintain itself. It's easy to take it for granted and not realize how much work CDC is doing to keep us all blissfully complacent.
- shiggerino 11y agoSure, but unwarranted fear of dead bodies isn't good either. Not even many infectious diseases remain infectious, since dead people can't cough or sneeze. And there's no such thing as miasma either. Here's a good explanation from a mortician: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yw7bsNKsABQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yw7bsNKsABQ
- MatekCopatek 11y agoThe public health aspect is definitely important. The country where I live has very strict limits about handling dead bodies - they can only be buried in official cemeteries. If you opt for cremation, the ashes must also be buried or spread in selected official locations where they don't pose a hazard. Keeping grandpa in a can on top of the fireplace is out of the question. While I don't value physical remains, I understand some people really do and their opinions must be respected. But it's similar to religious circumcision - when your customs start interfering with people's health, you lose absolute rights to always do what you want.
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- icebraining 11y agoAre the hashes of dead people really any more dangerous than the ashes of coal or wood that every fireplace or BBQ produces? Sounds too heavy-handed an approach to me.
- kijin 11y agoHashes of dead people sound like you took a SHA hash of each of them to remember the unique mark that they left on Earth forever. "Here lies John Doe, commit ID: 1b372d0e." On a more serious note, if the funeral director and crematory did their jobs properly, anything dangerous (such as dental fillings containing mercury) should have been removed, either before cremation or before grinding. My country is slightly more lenient. My grandparents' ashes are buried in my parents' back yard, and we had to do quite a bit of paperwork to make it legal. It's still illegal to scatter the ashes in any public land or body of water, and I can understand that because certain scenic locations would quickly become a big pile of ashes if it were allowed.
- angdis 11y agoWhat people do with ashes is completely unenforceable. How can anyone stop somebody from putting remains wherever they like? How would anyone know? Technically, they're not "ashes" but "cremains" and are composed almost entirely calcium and salts which is very different from ash (the residue of a fire burning).