Japan: forensic dentistry to get boost, college training enhancement urged

The health ministry has decided to include forensic dentistry questions in a 2014 national dentistry examination to enhance use of the highly accurate method used to identify many bodies after the Great East Japan Earthquake.

The law covering the investigation of causes of death and identification of bodies, which stipulates the dentists' involvement in identification work, will be enacted in April.

To prepare for it, the Japan Dental Association aims to increase annual training sessions for dentists to learn the skills.

To identify bodies, dentists check past dental work among other information gleaned from the deceased's teeth and record the data on forms that are compared to medical charts recorded while the person was alive.

As dentists use photographs and X-rays to examine teeth and dental work, bodies can be identified with a high degree of accuracy.

After last year's disaster, 15,576 victims, or 98.6 percent of the bodies found, were identified by the end of August. Of them, 1,213 bodies, or nearly 10 percent, were identified using forensic dentistry techniques.

So far, there have been at least 13 cases in which bodies have been reportedly misidentified and returned to the wrong families. In these cases, the bodies were identified solely based on their appearance, with no dental identification carried out.

Excluding natural disasters, about 1,200 unidentified bodies are found in the nation every year. Dental associations in each prefecture and Tokyo have a committee that cooperates with police in identifying bodies.

However, in many prefectures, each committee has only several dozen members, and of the about 100,000 registered dentists in the country, only a fraction have experience with dental forensics.

Dental identification requires experience and special knowledge--for instance, that it is difficult to open the mouth of a deceased person, or that the teeth of burned bodies are badly damaged.

However, only six of 29 dental universities or universities with dentistry departments in the nation offer dental forensics courses.

In the national dentistry examination set to take place in February 2014, the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry will include questions to test knowledge of dental identification.

The ministry decided to cover the subject "to urge all the universities [with dentistry departments] to improve related education," according to an official of the ministry's office that handles applications for national licenses.

In spring last year, the Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Ministry also recommended increasing forensic dentistry courses in its guidelines for dentistry-related universities, and is in the process of surveying the current state of forensic dentistry education.

About 2,600 dentists were dispatched to the areas hit by last year's disaster. However, dental identification work did not progress as planned because the forensics forms varied among prefectures, including Tokyo, while some areas simply lacked dentists with such training.

The Japan Dental Association will conduct a yearly intensive expert training course at seven sites across the nation, including Tokyo, Fukuoka and Hyogo prefectures, between November and February, toward launching a full-scale program to train coordinators in charge of dispatching and instructing dentists in cooperation with administrative authorities and police.

Tadahiro Yanagawa, the association's standing director, said, "We'd like to establish uniform standards for body identification and create a system for broad, coordinator-centered cooperation in the event of a disaster."

Thursday 22 November 2012

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/T121121004822.htm