RFID Implants to Identify the Dead

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.