Dead body smell <<GRAPHIC>>

[infebious]

...any more pics??

 

[TiminMishawaka]

I had one fried too before, couple years ago. Definitely a hog roast smell to that. I'll take fried over exploded any day.

 

[WLW]

In the cool trashy novels I've read, I heard about the Vicks thing. Fact check your novels before applying real world application. Also, this thread makes me want to vomit.

My brother-in-law said they used spearimint oil under their notrils in med school when in gross anatomy. Masked the dead smell quite well I guess.

 

[ChrisK]

At the beginning of my Air Force career I volunteered to work in the mortuary at Dover AFB during the Jim Jones deal. The smell of 916 bodies that had been rotting out in the jungle heat for days is something that you can never forget. The flight crews said that they stayed on oxygen on the flights back to Dover just to keep from getting sick. Wintergreen paste in your mask works wonders!

 

[randyb]

"Would you like some hard candy?"
"That's not candy!"
"No, but it's hard!"

RandyB, you KNOW where that one came from.

Cathy, you know you can edit your post...

Hehehehe....lol. Getting back to the putrifucation of the human body though. Yep "dead funky guy" odor is pretty specific and once registered sticks. I have found that vicks vapor rub works ok for me when applied around the nose. For myself being able to clean up afterwards is the best option. Oh and for the record, cleaning up cooked people from a fire, cleaning up and then thinking you can eat a burger is not a good idea, the smell resulted in an immediate reaction of throwing up.

 

[Eddie]

The first time I ever smelled it it triggered vague hunger reactions because that was before I saw the victim and it has that slightly sweet smell of roasted pork. Now it's the opposite way around: burnt pork kills my appetite, especially if I am looking at the carcass. Smell is a powerful trigger. Luckily pulled pork and BBQ don't trigger that reaction, cuz I loves BBQ!

As far as people go, I stopped most of the black humor a long time ago. Some deaths I've witnessed bother me, most don't unless I think too hard about them. Professional detachment gets more professional and less of an act the more you deal with it.

Yes. It has been smells over the years that have brought back some of the most vivid memories. With me it is . Not every time I smell it but sometimes. It brings back memories of two different but particularly violent episodes that ended with dead people really unloading themselves.

 

[gtrlspl]

if you cant laugh at a fried human being, what can you laugh at?

ChoMos being prison raped...

 

[Andyland]

Which diseases can be spread by dead bodies? Virtually all normally transmissible human diseases, particularly the especially virulent ones, die within a short period of the host dying.

I'm not trying to be flip here, I know that intestinal flora and fauna are potentially dangerous from both living and dead animals/people, and water contamination from decaying corpses can be an issue, but other than that a decaying body laying in the street isn't especially dangerous from the standpoint of disease that I know of. Living people who are sick are far more dangerous than dead ones as far as I know, but if someone knows different I'd love to further my education on it. There have been situations where some pathogens can survive in human hosts for several days after death in situations of low temperature, but generally once putrefaction occurs those organisms are gone.

Natural disasters, corpses and the risk of infectious diseases

I don't think you will need to worry about viruses so much, just bacteria.
Flies land on crap and corpses, pick up bacteria and land on you.
Lots of bodies close by,more flies after two days, lots more bacteria.
Flies land on your hand, you rub your eyes or mouth or open wound, or they land on your food. People were dirtier before indoor plumbing, the child mortality rate was 7 out of 10 in some places, until they developed some sort of immunity. We have been clean our whole lives... less natural immunity.

 

[grizman]

When I was in Boy Scouts in the early 60s, we were camping out in a farmer's woods next to the creek that ran through it with his permission. There was a heavy rain that night and a couple of dead hogs that had been dragged to the back of the woods next to the creek , unbenknownst to us. One of them was washed downstream and ended up next to our campsite. It peaked out interest when we got up and saw if snagged on a branch next to the bank. Some of us climbed down the muddy slope to examine the carcass that had little or not hair left on it and was inflated like a big baloon by the internal gases generated by the hot summer sun. One of the younger scouts grabbed a sharply pointed stick and popped that sucker like a big zit on a teenager's face. You would not believe how god awful the smell was. Getting up that high and very slippery mud bank was no easy task. The terrible smell hung over our campsite like a dense fog. Needless to say, none of us wanted to eat the breakfast that was being prepared by some of our fellow scouts. The thought of crispy bacon at that time and for a long time thereafter was the farthest thing from my mind. The moral of my story is never to poke an inflated carcass with a sharp stick unless you are planning on going on a diet. Just my contribution to this thread.

My younger brother poked a bloated hairless cow carcus in a woods clearing once. I had taken him squirrel hunting and yes it was awful.

About two years later we had been in fla for 3 weeks, end of july first of august, at home or deep freeze quit with a whole beef in it. This was located in our equiptment barn and had many boxed rolls of bailing twine stacked on top. I had put the beef in the freezer, I was sent to retrieve 2#'s of burger for supper. I cheated lifted the lid stuck my upper body in reaching for the burger before the smell hit! When we pulled it out all the beef was a gooy sludge in the bottom!
Since then I can tolerate the smell of dead and decaying better than most.
IT IS STILL NASTY though!
As far a roasting meat it has a different smell to me. I can qualify personal knowledge of the burning human odor. I had 3rd degree on my right side waist up, could see the flames coming from my skin! Almost everyone asks how bad did it hurt? Subjective to ones tolerence to pain, I didn't blackout or pass out, rode to the emergency room in the bed of the pick up, walked in on my own, etc etc. Laid still while the trauma doc scoped my lungs looking for blisters, signs of flame/heat inhalation. Then came the debreading/scrubbing with the dreaded green soap. I was offered pain killers after the fact, I think I may have taken maybe two to help sleep the first couple of nights is all.
I am not a good person to describe levels of pain, I have been on fire,shot,hit by schrapnel,stabbed,cut/slashed 31 broken bones, steel splinters in both eyes, exposed to CS gas,tazered on a bet. Racecar and moto cross crashes, kicked by horses etc etc. Dang I am lucky to have survived this long. No I was not a sheltered child! There is more but I am out of time!

 

[TiminMishawaka]

"tazered on a bet"

Only a guy could understand how reasonable this is. I had an interesting time explaining to my friends why I tazered myself to know for sure what kind of effects it would have on someone.


BTW, I got the police report back and it turns out the guy offed himself and no one heard the shot.

 

[printcraft]

..................
I am not a good person to describe levels of pain, I have been on fire,shot,hit by schrapnel,stabbed,cut/slashed 31 broken bones, steel splinters in both eyes, exposed to CS gas,tazered on a bet. Racecar and moto cross crashes, kicked by horses etc etc. .........

Holy cow!! Is your name Super Dave Osborne?