In Harrison County, Mississippi, the dead are being implanted with RFID chips.
From
CNET
The U.S. Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team (DMORT) and health officials in Mississippi's Harrison County are implanting human
cadavers with RFID chips from VeriChip in an effort to speed up the process of identifying victims and providing information to families, VeriChip
said Friday. In addition, the County Medical Examiner's office in Lafayette County, Miss., said it will stock RFID chips and scanners for future
disaster relief. Louisiana is also expected to begin using the system soon, which should help officials cope with the estimated 500 unidentified
bodies in the state.
and from
Redherring
“These bodies are in an advanced stage of decomposition,” said John Procter, VeriChip’s director of communications. “Many of them have
no identification marks, no wallets, no IDs. In some cases a toe tag is not even viable.”
and finally from my latest post on
RFID Technology Research Project
Issues from the evacuation of survivors and the retrieval of the dead have brought up many reasons for the required implantation of RFID chips.
Each issue can be easily remedied by the implantation of RFID chips.
1. Locating survivors and the dead: If each person had an RFID chip, rescue workers could scan each area in a grid like fashion. The survivors could
be rescued systematically. Debris fields could be scanned for the living and the dead. Areas that contained dead bodies could be marked for later
retrieval. The dead could be instantly identified.
I had a feeling that the
argument for RFID tags would be discussed in the aftermath of Katrina, but I did not forsee the actual use of tags on
cadavers. However, it is an interesting developement.