Misinterpretation of Anogenital Findings and Misdiagnosis of Child Sexual Abuse: The Role of the Forensic Pathologist.

BACKGROUND: The interpretation of anogenital postmortem findings is an issue of main concern, because the nature and appearance of anogenital tissues during the postmortem interval is not widely known by health providers. CASE: An 8-year-old girl died in the hospital 48 hours after hospitalization. On the basis of the atypical anogenital findings, the health care professionals notified the fact to the Public Prosecutor as an alleged child abuse. The forensic pathologist ruled out this possibility, interpreting the anal findings due to physiological postmortem anal alterations and to the insertion of suppositories before death. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION: Forensic pathological analysis should be included in routine postmortem evaluation in the case of suspected child sexual abuse, because normal postmortem findings could be misinterpreted by physicians, whose sole experience is on the basis of antemortem scenarios.

From abstract to publication: the fate of research presented at an annual forensic meeting.

In forensic sciences, the fate of abstracts presented at international meetings has not yet been assessed. The purpose of this study is to estimate publication ratio and evaluate possible predictors of publication after the 58th edition of the 2006 American Academy of Forensic Sciences annual meeting. Section of the meeting, type of presentation (oral platform or poster), number of authors per abstract and per paper, time span to publication, countries involved, and journal of publication were tabulated. A total of 623 abstracts were presented, from which 102 were subsequently published as a full paper. The overall publication rate was 16.4%, ranging from 3.4% (jurisprudence) to 28.8% (toxicology). The type of presentation (oral platform or poster) did not significantly affect the outcome of the abstract. However, a higher number of authors, foreign authors, and international collaboration were found to be good predictive factors of publication.

Nonchemical suffocation deaths in forensic setting: a 6-year retrospective study of environmental suffocation, smothering, choking, and traumatic/positional asphyxia.

There are still several areas of forensic pathology mainly based on tradition, with textbooks explaining and describing common knowledge that is not supported by modern research data. This study is intended to contribute to evidence-based data on nonchemical suffocation deaths in the forensic population aged more than 1 year. From 2000 to 2005, all autopsy cases were reviewed: age, gender, type of suffocation, and manner of death were compiled for all victims (96 cases). In general, the results from this study are concordant with the textbook literature, therefore supporting common knowledge related to manner of death in nonchemical suffocation. However, discrepancies have been underscored in smothering: smothering, contrary to the general belief, is probably not mostly homicidal, and accidental smothering is probably not that unusual. Furthermore, new data without actual literature correlates were obtained in the conducting of this study and are presented here.