Modern advances in disaster victim identification (Editorial)

Abstract

It is a sad indictment of modern society that the mass media on which it relies for information about the cur- rent world has become almost immune to the impact of mass fatality. Major disasters become indistinguish- able from the rest of the news, whether such incidents are of natural or unnatural causation. In this way the occasion of multiple deaths occurring in one incident becomes just another headline. Sadly, this means that the very real distress that is inevitably felt by the rela- tives and friends of victims of these incidents becomes forgotten in the ensuing chaos and upheaval that fre- quently follows such disasters.