BEIJING – China’s top health body said Thursday that health workers who improperly dispose of dead babies will be “severely dealt with” following an investigation into the dumping of several bodies along a river in eastern China.

A scandal erupted last month when the bodies of 21 babies and fetuses – some with hospital identification tags around their ankles and at least one stuffed in a yellow bag marked “medical waste” – were found washed ashore on the Guangfu river on the outskirts of Jining city in Shandong province.

The Ministry of Health said on its website that hospitals should dispose of dead babies as they would any other corpse.

“The incident exposed loopholes in the hospital management, created negative social influence and yielded profound lessons,” the Ministry of Health report said.

The report said dead babies and fetuses should not be treated as medical waste, but did not give details on how local hospitals normally dispose of medical waste.

Calls to the Ministry of Health rang unanswered Thursday afternoon.

Two hospital mortuary workers, Zhu Zhenyu and Wang Zhijun, were fired by their hospital and detained by police as suspects, the official Xinhua News Agency reported, citing Jining government spokesman Gong Zhenhua. The babies’ families had paid the pair to dispose of the bodies, but they instead dumped them at the river.

In China, most families are permitted to have only one or two children and a traditional preference for sons remains strong and the abandoning, aborting and killing of newborn baby girls is still common in rural areas.

Infants who die from disease are often abandoned or buried in unmarked graves, not being old enough to be formally considered part of the family.

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