If someone you know is missing in the Nepal flood, you don't have to fly to Kathmandu

If someone you know is missing in the Bhote Koshi flood, you can be DNA-profiled in your own country and send the result to Nepal Police for comparison — you do not have to fly to Kathmandu to do it. That is the single most useful thing we can tell the families reading this, and it is not obvious from anything published so far.

Nepal is running the largest disaster victim identification effort in its history, and it is running it on a backlog. More bodies have been recovered than can be named.

What the numbers actually say

Ninety-five bodies have been identified and handed back to families. More than a thousand have not. Nepal Police put those figures out on 3 September, alongside a total of 1,794 DNA samples collected — 1,143 taken from remains and 651 from living relatives hoping for a match.

The national toll behind them keeps moving. The National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority counted 1,259 dead and 5,083 missing on the evening of 3 September, and 1,386 dead with about 5,130 still missing by 12 September. Every one of these figures is provisional, and we date each one on our running flood page rather than quoting a single number as final.

Why only 95 have been named

Because a flood destroys the things identification normally relies on. A body recovered 150 kilometres downstream in Chitwan, days after the water, rarely arrives with a face, a wallet or clothing anyone recognises.

That removes visual identification, which is how the overwhelming majority of bodies are named in an ordinary disaster. What remains is forensic: DNA, fingerprints and dental comparison, the three primary methods under Interpol’s Disaster Victim Identification framework that Nepal is following. All three are slow, and DNA is the slowest of them.

What a family outside Nepal actually does

You give a DNA sample where you live, and the profile is emailed to Nepal Police to be compared against the remains they hold. No flight, no visa, no arriving in Kathmandu to queue at a mortuary.

The comparison is run through the Nepal Police Central Forensic Science Laboratory, working with the Nepal Academy of Science and Technology and the National Forensic Science Laboratory. India has separately offered DNA profiling facilities to relatives of the missing. A profile can be built from a close blood relative, or from the missing person’s own belongings — a hairbrush, a toothbrush, anything carrying their DNA rather than someone else’s.

Start with your own foreign ministry or embassy, not with a search engine. The embassy is what connects a family abroad to the police file, and we keep the contact list for the affected nationalities on our page for families of missing foreign nationals.

What happens to the 897 already buried

Burial here is a public-health measure, not an ending. The 897 bodies interred under government protocol were sampled first, so the DNA record exists independently of the grave.

That matters for a family who has not yet come forward. A match made in November against a body buried in September is still a match, and still a name. The burials were forced by the condition of the remains and the scale of them, not by anyone giving up on identifying them.

Why two families claimed the same body

Because in a disaster this size visual recognition stops being reliable, and grief makes people certain. The Philippine Daily Inquirer reported two families claiming the same body — the clearest possible argument for a rule that looks bureaucratic from the outside.

Interpol’s framework requires a complete match between the two sets of data before an identification is declared. That is why the count sits at 95 instead of several hundred. A fast, wrong identification hands the wrong family a body and leaves the right one still searching, and both mistakes are close to impossible to undo after a funeral.

What we would tell a family waiting

Give the sample now, even if you are holding on to the hope that it will not be needed. There are 651 relative samples against more than a thousand unidentified bodies, and that gap is the reason matches are not being made faster.

Every profile added to the reference side raises the chance that a body already recovered gets a name. The sample costs a family nothing except the admission that it might be necessary, which is the hardest part of it and the reason people wait.

More than a thousand people in Nepal are currently a body without a name. Most of them will get one, and the samples families give now are what decides how long that takes.

Cover photo: Muhammad Amdad Hossain via Pexels (Pexels License). Section photos: CP Khanal via Pexels (Pexels licence); Keira Burton via Pexels (Pexels licence); Tim Douglas via Pexels (Pexels licence); Sushant Bista via Pexels (Pexels licence); Israyosoy S. via Pexels (Pexels licence).