"Bowel wall hemorrhage": a characteristic sign in hanging death.

Bowel wall hemorrhage is recently suggested as a characteristic sign of death by hanging. This prospective cross-sectional study was carried out to determine the frequency of bowel wall hemorrhage in autopsies performed on corpses identified as death-by-hanging in Tehran's autopsy hall. All hanging cases from June 2011 to end of June 2012 were included in this study. Demographic data were collected, physical examination was completed and postmortem changes were recorded in all cases. Autopsies were performed focused to identify bowel wall hemorrhage. Severe putrefied corpses, cases with the history and signs of abdominal trauma, history of coagulopathies and chronic intestinal diseases were excluded from this study. The frequency and standard deviation were calculated. T-test and Chi-square test were used to analyze the data. 138 hanging cases were studied. Bowel wall hemorrhage was confirmed by microscopic examination in 16 cases (11.6%). The mean age was 35.31 ± 11.41 years. The mean of height, weight and BMI were 173.25 ± 6.06 cm, 71.56 ± 7.76 kg, and 28.80 ± 2.01 kg/m(2) respectively. Hanging was complete in 9 cases (56.2%). Our findings show that after exclusion of other conditions leading to intra-abdominal congestion, presence of bowel wall hemorrhage, especially in the small bowel, can be an important sign for death by hanging together with other previously described signs.

Equality in Distribution of Human Resources: the Case of Iran's Ministry of Health and Medical Education.

BACKGROUND: Equity in access to and utilization of health services is a common goal of policy-makers in most countries. The fair allocation of human resources is one of the dimensions of equity, which was evaluated in this study. METHODS: We evaluated the equity of human resources' distribution among Iran's medical science universities between 2005 and 2009 by inequality measures including Lorenze curve, Gini coefficient and Rabin hood indexes. RESULTS: In the distribution 60403 recruitment licenses among medical universities with 72456140 covered populations, Gini coefficient was 0.167 and Robin Hood Index 0.11. CONCLUSIONS: Calculations indicated Recruitment licenses are equitably distributed in MOH&ME of Iran. However a portion of recruitment licenses should redistributed for achieving perfect equal distribution among all public medical universities of Iran.