New Orleans Locals Think Katrina's Toll Is Still Rising

Surge in Deaths Blamed On Storm-Related Stress

Funeral director Louis Charbonnet is convinced that hurricane-related stress is the cause of many of the deaths that his business is now handling. (By Linton Weeks -- The Washington Post)

NEW ORLEANS -- The official death toll of Hurricane Katrina is more than 1,300. The unofficial toll of the storm may take that a lot higher.

Though not quantifiable in the orthodox fashion, because so many area health agencies are still in disarray, a belief exists among many here that the natural mortality rate of New Orleanians -- whether still in the city or relocated -- has increased dramatically since, and perhaps because of, Katrina.

The daily newspaper has seen a rise in reported deaths. Local funeral homes are burying just as many people as they did last year, though the population has decreased. Families say that their kin who had been in good health are dying, and attribute that to the stress brought on by the hurricane, flooding and relocations.

It is too early for state officials to have statistics for last year, said Bob Johannessen of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals. And epidemiologists are reluctant to draw conclusions based on anecdotal information.

Still, stress here is palpable, and it is overwhelming people of all ages, said psychiatrist James Barbee, director of an anxiety clinic at Louisiana State University. "People are struggling terribly."

Barbee said he has seen many more patients with serious problems -- hypertension, diabetes out of control, suicidal tendencies -- than before the storm. "Katrina took all order away from lives," he said, and the effect can be extremely deleterious.

The increase in deaths is seen the pages of the local newspaper, the Times-Picayune, where the number of deaths reported in January was up 25 percent from the same month in 2005, according to publisher Ashton Phelps Jr.

New Orleans Parish Coroner Frank Minyard said he doesn't keep records on natural deaths, but that he believes "stress causes an increase in the rise of natural-death rates."

Louis Charbonnet, 67, president of Charbonnet-Labat Funeral Home on St. Philip Street in the Tremé neighborhood, said, "It's an absolute fact." New Orleanians are "dying away," he said. "They are distressed by being displaced."

Stress, he added, is the "hidden killer."

There is stress in the air. It's as tangible here as the gumbo-thick fog that occasionally rolls over the city. People have lost their loved ones, homes, jobs, cars, pets, keepsakes, their general sense of comfort and good health.

Ronald Chisom said his 84-year-old mother, Evelyn Comeaux, was doing just fine before Katrina. She took her medications but she could get out and about a lot of the time. "She liked to go to the casino with her girlfriends," Chisom, 64, said. When the floodwaters came, Comeaux was rescued by helicopter, taken to the airport, flown to Austin and then eventually to Houston where she was reunited with her son, who had lost his home in the flood.