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 Nachrichten.
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GetDPA 1.10 -- JAN 6, 2005 17:03:42