<Disaster Victim Identification

Aberdeen Medico-Chirurgical Society Scientific Meeting Thursday 2 nd . October 2008

Summary of talk by Professor Sue Black, an Aberdeen graduate and now Director of the Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification at the University of Dundee , addressed the Society on the subject of Disaster Victim Identification (DVI).

Throughout her talk she emphasised the need for the dead to be handled with decency, dignity and respect, and extreme sensitivity towards the families of victims and potential victims.

• A casualty bureau is established to handle the many thousands of calls that may come from concerned relatives immediately after a disaster.

• Family liaison officers visit families and friends of suspected victims.

• Investigation is made of ante-mortem data gathered from potential victims' homes to gain information which may be useful in establishing identities. Post-mortem data is gathered from victims' remains.

• An identification commission is set up by legal authorities of countries concerned to take responsibility for identification, based on evidence gathered by forensic scientists.

This process has been subject to criticism because it is necessarily slow, as it must be done with extreme care and sensitivity.

Criteria used in identification fall into three categories – primary, secondary and tertiary. Primary criteria are those which are virtually unique to individuals – fingerprints, DNA (surrogate and familial), dental records and unique medical conditions such as an implant with a serial number. Usually legal authorities accept one of these as establishing identity, although all have potential problems. Secondary criteria are distinctive jewellery, personal effects and clothing, scars, marks, tattoos, blood group and known physical disease. Legal authorities generally require two or three of these for confirmation of identity. Tertiary criteria are visual identification, photographs, clothing, body location and descriptions. These are very unreliable and of background assistance only.

The British DVI Team was established in 2005 to deal with disasters at home and overseas when British citizens are involved and assistance is requested by foreign governments. The British response to the tsunami that year was embarrassingly inadequate in the early days. That year a number of disasters occurred globally – the tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, the Pakistan earthquake as well as the London bombings. Officers of the Metropolitan Police were the usual British response to such disasters but could not cope. It became clear that a more structured system of response was needed to supplement, not replace, local provision of resources by providing trained personnel with specialist skills. The number of trained people needed for the team – estimated to be about 500 police officers - was based on a risk assessment that indicated a team of such as a size as to be able to deal with three independent but simultaneous disasters in separate parts of the UK and involving up to 1000 fatalities. A training course was established at the Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification in Dundee with the aim of producing standardised training of this team, which is recruited from all UK police forces, within two years.

As a result the UK has gone from being an international embarrassment to world leader in the field of Disaster Victim Identification in only three years.

After time for wide-ranging questions from Members of the Society the Vote of Thanks was proposed by Dr. Jamie Grieve .