Several posts have got involved in the blood alcohol debate (examples being Blood alcohol, Categories of drunk and Wobbling into the road after a night at the pub….). Should NZ reduce the blood alcohol limit for driving a motor vehicle from 80 mg alc/100 ml blood to 50? The UK still has 80 in blood as the legal limit and we in NZ take a lot of what we do in our justice system from theirs.

One thing that has not so far been mentioned is that the NZ breath alcohol limit for driving a motor vehicle is 400 ug alc/L breath. This is established using a blood:breath ratio in the region of 2100:1. In the UK, this ratio is 2300:1, which means that the legal breath limit is 350 ug/L breath (there are plenty of studies that deal with this issue such as Cobb, P.; Dabbs, M., 1985: Report on the performance of the Lion Intoximeter 3000 and the Camic Breath Analyser evidential breath alcohol measuring instruments during the period 16 April 1984 to 15 October 1984. Her Majesty’s Stationery Office.   Jones, A., 1993: Disappearance rate of ethanol from the blood of human subjects: implications in forensic toxicology. Journal of Forensic Sciences, 38, 104-118, as well as various Home Office data.    The online version of Clarke’s Analysis of Drugs and Poisons will also be receiving an update from one of the world’s leading minds in this area but that will be next year so I can’t say too much more about it).

50 ug alc/L breath might not sound a lot but in a country like NZ that has a severe attitude problem when it comes to drink driving, it could make a difference.

Once again, alcohol-related stories are all over the media (Drunk driver haunted by night of shame; Joyce to review drink-driving loophole; ‘Humiliated’ barrister to plead guilty to drink-driving; Car death: ‘Any other kid, you’d be in jail’).  All of these cases, and most of the alcohol-related cases that are reported in the media, contain stories about people who were drunk and were driving motor vehicles – a catastrophic state of affairs at the best of times.

However, thought should also occasionally be given to those cases where the drivers are not over the alcohol driving limit but where people still die because they’re drunk.  I have worked on many road traffic cases where drunk pedestrians strayed into the path of an oncoming vehicle, were hit and killed or seriously injured.  The trauma of the event will never leave the sober driver but in many of these cases the ‘victim’ was too drunk to know what literally hit them.

Recent research in Forensic Science International Supplement Series demonstrates what we have all known for some time – that pedestrians belong to the group of road users with the highest mortality rate.  Basically, drunk pedestrians are classed as amongst those road users most at risk.  Work completed by Slovenian scientists shows that alcohol-positive pedestrians who died in road traffic incidents between 1999 and 2006 (n = 125) were predominantly younger men, who had a higher level of risk of a road accident, greater incidence of injuries and a shorter period of survival following a road accident – 92% of them died in the six hours after a road traffic incident, usually of head trauma [source: Prijon & Ermenc, 2009. Influence of alcohol intoxication of pedestrians on injuries in fatal road accidents. Forensic Science International Supplement Series, 1, pp. 33–34].

In one case I clearly remember, the pedestrian was a woman who was so drunk she ended up in the road in front of an oncoming motor vehicle.  My job in that case was to calculate her blood alcohol concentration at the time of the incident.  The unfortunate driver had been charged with death by careless driving but he said the pedestrian had just fallen into the road in front of him.  His lawyer was sensible enough to ask an alcohol expert (me) how drunk the pedestrian had been at the time of the incident: considerably, was the answer.  Enough to have significantly impaired her ability to co-ordinate her limbs (see Categories of “drunk”) – she probably literally stepped into the road in front of the car.

It just goes to show that even if people are responsible enough not to drive themselves home, they’re still a potential hazard.  And then there are the non-traffic incidents where people are so drunk they fall into or off things – but that’s a different story.

NZ Police have recently issued a press release to assure the population that there is nothing wrong with the tasers they are using and that a few unsuccessful discharges are to be expected. In fact, the taser trial involved a 12.5% failure rate (2/16) compared with a 13.3% failure rate in the field (4/30) – comparable figures although perhaps the trial was not the largest n ever seen.

The NZ Police press release was in response to media articles about the inefficiency of tasers including the recent case where a police dog was fatally shot and two police officers were shot and wounded (Taser unsuccessfully discharged).

However, I don’t recall seeing any news items about a case where the use of a taser saved the life of the man the Police were attempting to detain (perhaps I’m wrong and it was headline news but I don’t remember seeing it). On 18 June this year, Waikato Police attended Te Kuiti’s main street just after midnight where ambulance staff had been trying to treat a man who was bleeding heavily and who was also known by the Police to have a history of mental illness. The injured man was subdued by Police with a taser and he was then transported in an ambulance to hospital. It wasn’t until after the subdued man was in the ambulance that everyone realised he had sustained a cut to his artery. Apparently, if the man had not been subdued and therefore treated relatively quickly, he would have bled to death.

Now that’s the sort of story that I think should be reported on the 6 o’clock news – let’s have something positive as well as the usual negative.

I have just returned on a bumpy flight from Nelson following my stint at SciCon 2010, the the biennial conference of the New Zealand Association of Science Educators (NZASE). The theme of SciCon 2010 is ‘Journey to Discovery’ and there are plenty of interesting speakers and workshops (it runs until this Wednesday, 7 July).

Having never attended a scientific educators conference before, I had no idea what to expect and being the opening speaker at a conference means you have no way to gauge what the audience is expecting or what they like to hear.

Knowing that forensic science is taught in many intermediate schools these days, my keynote speech was about the CSI effect and how the spark of interest that has been developed in children around the world, including New Zealand, offers educators an unmissable opportunity to attract students into science.  It also gave me the opportunity to put to rest some of those myths that programs like CSI have created.

For example, it is not possible to determine year and location of manufacture of a shoe using a sole pattern deposited at a crime scene. Even if it were, we wouldn’t be able to do it in New Zealand because there is no national footwear sole pattern database, even though the States has had one since the 1930s and the UK has had one for over 20 years and probably considerably longer (I understand it’s a cost-related issue – a reasonable excuse, do you think?).

It was also a surprise to some that the information gathered by CSIs can equally be used to exclude someone from an investigation as it can to prove their guilt – the science tells a story based on fact. Investigations should be geared by what the information is saying, not focussing the information towards the suspect.

It’s important to remember as well that there are thousands of students the world over wanting to become forensic scientists but it’s highly competitive and there are less jobs than there were. Cuts in casework and evidence submission to laboratories is being driven by cuts in police budgets (that includes NZ); lab budgets are being reduced in an effort to reduce costs. Sometime, somewhere along the line, the justice system is going to fail someone. I just hope that mistakes or lack of analysis get picked up before it’s too late.

I also ran a workshop on Alcohol and Adolescents and how the knowledge I have as a professional Expert Witness specialising in alcohol cases can be used by educators to help adolescents deal with issues around alcohol consumption. It was extremely eye-opening for all concerned, including me, and I think we all learnt from it.  I hope some new collaborations will come of it all.

I found the whole experience very rewarding. Science education has come a long way since I was at school and there is now a whole range of exciting experiments that can be used to demonstrate key aspects of science inexpensively but very effectively.  I hope the people who heard me speak got something from my presentations – the feedback was certainly plentiful and all positive. Which is good, because I was shockingly bad at the pub quiz  – sorry….

I have just returned on a bumpy flight from Nelson following my stint at SciCon 2010, the the biennial conference of the New Zealand Association of Science Educators (NZASE). The theme of SciCon 2010 is ‘Journey to Discovery’ and there are plenty of interesting speakers and workshops (it runs until this Wednesday, 7 July).

Having never attended a scientific educators conference before, I had no idea what to expect and being the opening speaker at a conference means you have no way to gauge what the audience is expecting or what they like to hear.

Knowing that forensic science is taught in many intermediate schools these days, my keynote speech was about the CSI effect and how the spark of interest that has been developed in children around the world, including New Zealand, offers educators an unmissable opportunity to attract students into science.  It also gave me the opportunity to put to rest some of those myths that programs like CSI have created.

For example, it is not possible to determine year and location of manufacture of a shoe using a sole pattern deposited at a crime scene. Even if it were, we wouldn’t be able to do it in New Zealand because there is no national footwear sole pattern database, even though the States has had one since the 1930s and the UK has had one for over 20 years and probably considerably longer (I understand it’s a cost-related issue – a reasonable excuse, do you think?).

It was also a surprise to some that the information gathered by CSIs can equally be used to exclude someone from an investigation as it can to prove their guilt – the science tells a story based on fact. Investigations should be geared by what the information is saying, not focussing the information towards the suspect.

It’s important to remember as well that there are thousands of students the world over wanting to become forensic scientists but it’s highly competitive and there are less jobs than there were. Cuts in casework and evidence submission to laboratories is being driven by cuts in police budgets (that includes NZ); lab budgets are being reduced in an effort to reduce costs. Sometime, somewhere along the line, the justice system is going to fail someone. I just hope that mistakes or lack of analysis get picked up before it’s too late.

I also ran a workshop on Alcohol and Adolescents and how the knowledge I have as a professional Expert Witness specialising in alcohol cases can be used by educators to help adolescents deal with issues around alcohol consumption. It was extremely eye-opening for all concerned, including me, and I think we all learnt from it.  I hope some new collaborations will come of it all.

I found the whole experience very rewarding. Science education has come a long way since I was at school and there is now a whole range of exciting experiments that can be used to demonstrate key aspects of science inexpensively but very effectively.  I hope the people who heard me speak got something from my presentations – the feedback was certainly plentiful and all positive. Which is good, because I was shockingly bad at the pub quiz  – sorry….