The Kenyatta National Hospital (KNH) plans to bury the bodies of 541 people in the asylum if their relatives do not identify them within the next seven days.
Among the corpses are 475 children and 66 adults who may be buried in a mass grave if their families do not recognize them in the near future.
According to information from the hospital, seven of the adult bodies are female while the remaining 59 are male.
In the notice issued this week in the MyGov publication, KNH said the action it plans to take is in line with the requirement of the Public Health Act Chapter 242 of 1991 and the Code of Public Accounts.
According to the list provided by KNH, children are the most neglected after death and thus their corpses are piled up in the morgue of the hospital. A large number of children die while being treated in hospitals and their families and relatives fail to claim their bodies.
The Public Health Act requires that unclaimed corpses be removed from mortuary within two weeks. If not removed, the body should be buried in a mass grave after public officials obtain permission from the court.
KNH said a list of names of people whose bodies have not been retrieved is posted on a notice board in its mortuary. In addition, those names can be found on the referral hospital’s website.
Several hospitals in Nairobi County have continued to bear the burden of storing unclaimed dead bodies in their morgues. Last week, the Nairobi County government gave a seven-day deadline for residents to identify and collect the bodies of their loved ones at City Mortuary, Mama Lucy Kibaki Hospital and Mbagathi Hospital.
If the 185 bodies are not picked up before the end of that period, the Nairobi County government will bury them in a mass grave.
City Mortuary is storing 130 unclaimed corpses, Mbagathi Hospital has 838 corpses while that of Mama Lucy Kibaki has 17 corpses whose relatives have not claimed them.
The corpses were brought to the cemetery between September 2021 and December 2023 by police officers.
