More than 3,200 people remain listed as missing some five months after Hurricane Katrina struck the US' Gulf coast, officials have said.
Some may have been traced without being removed from the list, while others may have chosen to vanish.
But several hundred names are causing particular concern to the authorities.
Of almost 11,500 people reported missing in aftermath of the storm, more than 8,000 have been accounted for, state and federal workers said.
About 400 of those reported missing were from addresses in badly-flooded areas of the city of New Orleans, state medical examiner Dr Louis Cataldie was quoted as saying by the Associated Press news agency. He urged another thorough sweep of the rubble in the area.
It is also thought possible that some bodies could have been washed away by the flood waters.
The figures on the number of missing were released by the Find Family National Call Center, which holds information on people missing or killed as a result of the hurricane, which devastated the coast last August.
More than 1,300 people across five states were killed by the storm.
Some of the bodies found are undergoing pioneering DNA tests used to identify victims of the Balkans wars, to try to establish their identities.
'Insufficient response'
Meanwhile, Michael Brown, who lost his job as head of the US emergency agency Fema amid widespread criticism, conceded he should have done more to respond to the disaster.
"I should have asked for the military sooner. I should have demanded the military sooner," he told meteorologists in Sierra Nevada, California, on Wednesday.
"It was beyond the capacity of the state and local governments, and it was beyond the capacity of Fema," he said.
Speaking afterwards, Mr Brown told AP: "I think it's important to realise that all of us made mistakes. After a while you get a different perspective."
His remarks stand in contrast to comments he made at a congressional hearing into the response to the disaster, in September 2005, in which he blamed local and state officials for the failures.
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