JOHANNESBURG - Nearly 10,000 bodies are waiting to be identified each year in South Africa's medico-legal laboratories.
That's according to research conducted by Dr Kathryn Smith, head of the Visual Art Department at Stellenbosch University.
Smith, in her PhD, focused on forensic visual identification processes.
She says although forensic facilities photograph deceased people, her research shows that there's no image standardisation, making the post-mortem photos unreliable.
''In forensic human identification, we have primary and secondary identification methods, so in the South African context we have a complex context.
"People moving in and out of the country, potentially undocumented, dental records not always available, fingerprints. You need to have a sample on file, so this is a silent mass disaster, not a reality that many are aware of."