Identifying the victims of disaster a scientific challenge, expert says

Identifying the victims of disaster a scientific challenge, expert says

Christian Fuerst, Deustche Presse Agentur/Insbruck, Austria

The tsunami that devastated southern Asia poses a difficult
problem for international forensic science in identifying the
thousands of foreign victims who lost their lives in the
disaster, mainly in the seaside resorts of Thailand and Sri
Lanka.

The quest for certain identification threatens to turn into a
nightmare, according to Walther Parson, who heads the Forensic
Insitute in Innsbruck, Austria.

"It's like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack,"
the professor says.

The institute has been tasked with investigating body tissue
from all non-Asian victims who died in Sri Lanka, with the aim of
arriving at a DNA profile for each. This would theoretically
provide unambiguous identification for officials and relatives at
home.

This is the first step in comparing these DNA profiles with
those of the people missing in the disaster -- insofar as they
are available -- or with those of their blood relatives that will
be taken in the weeks ahead.

"Tests on the victims in Thailand will be done by a similar
institute in Australia or China," Parson says.

A team of 14 scientists in Innsbruck has begun with the
analysis of 31 samples, taken from the bodies of victims found by
the international Disaster Victim Identification Teams and that
could not be identified by standard methods.

The tests are undertaken on small bits of muscle, bone or
tooth tissue, which have been carefully registered and given a
unique barcode to ensure there are no mix-ups later.

"We have absolutely no idea of the scale of the task ahead of
us," Parson says. "At the moment we simply don't know how many
bodies of Western tourists have been found in Sri Lanka and
Thailand, how many of these could be identified and how many were
registered by the DVI teams."

If the institute has to analyse hundreds of tissue samples,
this could take months. What they do know is than among the
30,000 dead in Sri Lanka, some 5,000 are listed as missing.

Analysing these samples and saving the result in a central
databank is by no means the end of the matter. "We have to
undertake DNA analysis on samples taken from close relatives,"
Parson says.

Better still are samples taken ante-mortem from the victims
themselves, perhaps from a toothbrush or a hairbrush at home.

"As the DNA from close relatives is not identical, comparison
with that taken from the victims is complicated," he adds.

"And it is clear that we need samples from all those missing
on the ultimate lists of the various countries for comparison
purposes," Parson says, but these lists currently run into the
thousands.

Merely taking all the samples for comparison, a task being
carried out by the police authorities in the countries concerned,
could be a large task, Parson thinks.

In theory comparing them with the samples from the victims in
his laboratory should not present a huge problem, given the
computer software available.

"A DNA profile is quite small, taking up just 2 Kilobytes," he
says, and tests with the special software have been successful.

But if the profiles do not agree, and too many come from
relatives rather than the victims themselves, "then that means a
lot of computer time", he says.

Even when all the DNA profiles and possible comparative
samples are to hand, this does not mean that all victims will be
identified, the professor and his team warn.

This is because it is entirely possible that some of the
samples taken in haste in the disaster region are not from
European victims at all, but from Asians. "As a result of the
state of decomposition of the bodies, this cannot always be
ascertained," Parson notes.

Many victims' bodies were buried soon after the tsunami struck
to reduce the danger of disease, and this has further complicated
the task.

"We will have to get used to the idea that it will not be
possible to identify all the victims," the pathologist Edith
Tutsch-Bauer wrote in the Austrian newspaper Salzburger
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GetDPA 1.10 -- JAN 6, 2005 17:03:42