TJM: You are right to worry about insects and rats. While corpses do not cause disease, large numbers can create a boom in the number of rats and other animals which carry disease.

The connection between corpses and disease was originally made because people found that clearing away the bodies prevented epidemics. They concluded it was the bodies that had caused the disease, however it was increased population of rats and other critters that was the true culprit. Remove the bodies –> the rat population goes down –> no epidemic.

I was in Baghdad in 2003 and one problem that we had was that morgues (often co-located with hospitals) were brimming with corpses for weeks after the fighting stopped. The locals were pretty good about giving proper burials to strangers if someone was killed either by murder or by making the poor decision of engaging in a firefight with Americans. But, for some reason, there were morgues piled high with rotting corpses of people killed during the invasion of the city. I’ve been to mass graves in Bosnia – and the stench in Iraq was not quite that bad – but it was pretty ripe. I don’t know if this was an exaggeration or not, but the hospital workers complained to us that people in the vicinity were getting sick from it.

Totally ignorant question – do natural disaster dead cause epidemics? You hear this trope expressed in relation to cyclones etc (I’m thinking of the aftermath of Nargis in particular), and I wonder if there are any reasons why this would hold true in that situation.