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