Science News Review » Forensic Science

Rubbernecking At Home: The US “Death Map”

Aileen — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 21:15:12 +0000

For those of us who tend to be fascinated by charts, graphs, figures, maps and gnarly scenes of death and destruction, there’s a new county-by-county “Death Map” produced by researchers at the University of South Carolina at Columbia we can now peruse for the gnarly truth about who dies where the most.

Using statistics going all the way back to 1970, Susan Cutter and Kevin Borden of USC created the map to enable emergency management planners to examine various natural hazard risks to populations all over the country. These are deaths by floods, earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, extreme temperatures and other natural (but violent) causes.

The full publication from the International Journal of Health Geographics is available as a pdf at Spatial patterns of natural hazards mortality in the United States. But here’s a sneak preview… what’s your county’s ‘death-by-natural-hazard’ risk look like?

Resurrecting the 1918 Flu Pandemic

Aileen — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 16:16:08 +0000

…and the antibodies for survival

1918 Flu Antibodies Resurrected from Elderly Survivors

Back in 2005 some researchers journeyed to the Alaskan permafrost to dig up some bodies of victims of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic that killed 50-100 million people worldwide as World War 1 came to a close. They were able to recover the virus from these bodies because they have been frozen since burial.

Now researchers at Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt have recovered antibodies against this deadly flu virus from survivors of the pandemic. They collected blood samples from 32 survivors age 91 to 101, and found that all samples reacted to the virus – indicating that immunity has been preserved for 90 years. This represents the longest immune system ‘memory’ thus far observed.

The real test came when researchers at the CDC infected mice with the 1918 influenza and then administered the antibodies. Those receiving the lowest dose of antibodies died, all mice given the highest dose survived. The “extremely rare” B cells that produced the antibodies in all the survivors’ blood are some of “the most potent antibodies ever isolated against a virus,” and may prove invaluable against other viruses or for developing new antibodies against expected future pandemics.

Automated ID System for Mass Disaster Victims

Aileen — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 00:00:22 +0000

Japanese researchers have developed a New Automated System to identify victims of mass disasters. The type of disasters that usually end up with nothing but dental records for identification (if not DNA)… airplane crashes, suicide bombings, building collapses and such, where the victims come in small pieces, usually charred to a crisp.

The new system is a novel dental x-ray matching system that reduces the real-time input of forensic experts puzzling over parts of jaws and improves the accuracy of the results at the same time. Which is of course ‘good’ for the relatives of those victims waiting for something to bury with full honors in the family plot.

Mass disasters happen in this modern world, both natural and unnatural. Nearly 3,000 people died when terrorists flew planes into the Twin Towers in 2001, and the grizzly scenes of bombings in the Middle East are standard daily fare on the news. There are also earthquakes, tsunamis, floods and cyclones that kill hundreds or thousands at a time, not all of them found inside a home where it’s pretty easy to guess who they were.

This new Japanese system can make a positive match in less than 4 seconds. Let’s face it – that’s a lot faster than any of us as next-of-kin could identify a piece of jaw as belonging to someone we’ve known all their lives. And that can be a good thing for those left behind.

Link:
New Automated System IDs Victims of Mass Disasters in Minutes