MONDAY, Sept. 5 (HealthDayNews) — The grim task of dealing with the dead from Hurricane Katrina came into sharp focus Monday as authorities began collecting and counting the bodies strewn throughout still-flooded New Orleans.

And health relief efforts appeared to hit some red tape, as hundreds of volunteer doctors were reportedly stalled in their attempts to reach the survivors and others said their offers of help were basically ignored.

In the first official death count in the New Orleans area, Louisiana emergency medical director Louis Cataldie said authorities had verified 59 deaths — 10 of them at the Superdome, the Associated Press reported. The Superdome had housed thousands of refugees in what soon turned into nightmarish conditions last week.

The U.S. Public Health Service said a prison morgue near New Orleans was expecting 1,000 to 2,000 bodies. And more than 160 were known dead in Mississippi, according to the state’s emergency management team.

The seo tips preliminary counts seemed to confirm what the nation’s top health official had admitted Sunday: The dead will number in the thousands.

Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt told CNN he couldn’t provide a precise number for victims of the deadly storm, but he added, “I think it’s evident it’s in the thousands.”

On Monday, New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin predicted on NBC’s “Today” show that “it wouldn’t be unreasonable to have 10,000” dead.

And the secretary of homeland security, Michael Chertoff, warned that there will be gruesome sights in the days ahead.

“We need to prepare the country for what’s coming,” Chertoff told Fox News . “We are going to uncover people who died hiding in the houses, maybe got caught in the floods. It is going to be as ugly a scene as you can imagine.”

Meanwhile, help for the living was an uphill battle in some places.

A convoy of 100 surgeons and paramedics in a state-of-the-art mobile hospital was marooned in rural Mississippi as of Sunday, AP reported, because Louisiana officials would not let them into the New Orleans area.

“We have tried so hard to do the right thing. It took us 30 hours to get here,” said one of the frustrated surgeons, Dr. Preston “Chip” Rich of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. That government officials can’t straighten out the mess and get them assigned to a relief effort now that they’re just a few miles away “is just mind-boggling,” he told AP.

Other doctors also complained that their offers of help were turned away. A primary care physician from Ohio said he had called and e-mailed the HHS after seeing a notice on the American Medical Association’s Web site about volunteer doctors being needed. An e-mail reply told him to watch CNN Sunday night where Leavitt was to announce a Web address for doctors to enter their names in a database.

In seo services Biloxi, Miss., the kind of water-borne disease health officials have feared began to finally surface six days after Katrina hit, with officials closing a shelter there after more than 20 residents developed vomiting and diarrhea linked to what doctors believe may be dysentery.

Although companies residents had been warned to avoid drinking the water at the local school, some may still have done so, officials say. On the other hand, “Who knows what they swallowed before they got here, half of them were swimming in stuff that we don’t even know what it was,” Biloxi police Cpl. Kayla Robert told AP. All of the sick are being treated with antibiotics, officials said.

However, Dr. Julie Gerberding, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who was touring the devastated areas, said her biggest concerns now are tetanus and childhood diseases.

“Tetanus is something we’d be especially concerned ab