New article: The visibility of disaster deaths in news images: A comparison of newspapers from 15 countries

The new issue of the International Communication Gazette includes a paper I wrote about the newspaper coverage of the devastating 2010 Haiti earthquake. Building on my work on news representations of death, the article develops a five-step typology of death images, and compares the coverage among 15 countries, from the Americas, Oceania and Europe. Here is the abstract of the paper. The extent to which newspapers display graphic images of death has rarely been studied in relation to the degree of the visibility of bodies, nor do many comparative analyses exist. This has led to a narrow understanding of how and why audiences are exposed to human suffering around the world. In examining newspaper images of the dead from the 2010 Haiti earthquake across 15 countries, this study develops a graphic image content scale to measure such visualizations. It finds significant differences in graphic images across the studied sample, both in terms of the amount of images and the degree of visibility of death. The study argues that major sociocultural influences, such as different religious traditions and societal levels of violence are part of the reason for the differences. Paper can be found here: http://gaz.sagepub.com/content/74/7/655.full.pdf+html Monday 15 October 2012

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[Article] Estimating human age from T-cell DNA rearrangements

(Zubakov, D. et al. Current Biol. 20, R970–R971 (2010).
This paper describes a method for predicting the age of an individual from human blood. During immune system development, the rearrangement of T cell receptor loci produces episomal DNA molecules, the levels of which are known to decrease with age. Zubakov and colleagues show that quantification of these molecules by PCR can accurately predict the age of a sample donor, even with degraded or very small samples. This approach should be useful for identifying disaster victims or providing leads from crime scenes.

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Setting up an off-site emergency mortuary facility (EMF) to deal with a DVI incident: disaster victim management (DVM)

(Forensic Science, Medicine, and Pathology Online First DOI: 10.1007/s12024-011-9310-1 David Eitzen and Alex Zimmermann)

Forensic mortuaries in all Australian jurisdictions are dealing with increasing workloads, with routine cases regularly occupying greater than 50%, and often as much as 85%, of existing cold room body storage capacity, particularly over long weekends and during seasonal increases in respiratory infections. Hence the need to deal with a sudden influx of deceased persons or multiple body parts in a mass fatality incident would overwhelm most Australian forensic mortuaries, thereby requiring other means of body storage and processing. Exercise “Construct” was a joint South Australian Police (SAPol) and Forensic Science South Australia exercise designed to practice the establishment and construction of an emergency mortuary facility (EMF) to deal with a mass fatality incident and the subsequent disaster victim identification process. The aims of the exercise were to test preparedness, activation and construction processes relative to the establishment of an EMF. The exercise provided the opportunity to identify gaps in the capacity to successfully complete the tasks within the allotted time frames. The exercise reinforced the need to have a comprehensive and clearly documented process which must include a current list of suppliers who can deliver goods and services in a timely manner. The aim of this paper is to report on the exercise findings and share the experience with other jurisdictions. It will also provide other jurisdictions with the opportunity to consider whether the South Australian model will be useful to them in improving their own response when confronted with a mass fatality incident that may overwhelm existing local mortuary capacities and capabilities.

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