Experts from around the world join largest ever forensic investigation

[emad]

China to become key location in mammoth task

Jonathan Watts in Phuket
Tuesday January 4, 2005
The Guardian

It might have been numbness, exhaustion or simply that she was too young to realise what she was doing, but six-year-old Dana Trickett made barely a murmur when the Thai volunteer nurse asked her to contribute a DNA sample to help the authorities track down her missing mother and brother - both lost at Khao Lak beach in last week's tsunami.

Putting down the paper that she had been doodling on, she offered her hand for three nail clippings, allowed the nurse to take a few strands of hair and opened her mouth wide so that a saliva swab could be taken with a cotton bud.

After checking the samples, the police forensic science officer at Phuket town hall slipped the materials inside a brown envelope, marked it d44, and stapled it to the missing person's forms filled in by her British father, Michael.

The entire process took less than half an hour, but the results are not likely to come back for months, if they come back at all, because Dana and Michael's contribution is part of the biggest and most difficult victim identification operation the world has seen.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tsunami/story/0,15671,1382758,00.html

[DulceDecorum]

1. OH GAWD: The Mark of the Beast

bagging and tagging everyone in their search for the One.

[starroute]

2. How much money ...

... is going into DNA identification of dead Europeans and Americans that could be spent instead to help living Asians?

Is it just me, or are the priorities here as badly out of whack as I think they are?

[DulceDecorum]

4. The First Priority

is to understand what is truly important.
Surely you have heard of the book by Charles Darwin with the title:

The origin of species by means of natural selection; or, The preservation of favored races in the struggle for life.

Well, the favored races are being preserved.
Natural selection, baby, natural selection.

Both the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives held hearings, beginning in 1972, and the Senate adopted a resolution in 1973 calling for an international agreement "prohibiting the use of any environmental or geophysical modification activity as a weapon of war...." In response to this resolution, the President ordered the Department of Defense to undertake an in-depth review of the military aspects of weather and other environmental modification techniques.
http://www.state.gov/t/ac/trt/4783.htm

[DulceDecorum]

3. Incompetent pathologists

The spread of devastation is also unparalleled. After the Bali bomb in 2002, an international team of forensic experts took more than five months to identify 300 burnt and decomposing cadavers. In Thailand the devastation was spread over hundreds of miles of coastline and the victims came from a far higher number of nations. At least 30 countries have reported nationals missing in Phuket, Khao Lak and Phi Phi island.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/tsunami/story/0,15671,1382758,00.html

It took them OVER FIVE MONTHS TO ID 300 BODIES???
Then how long will it take for them to clean up after this?

WHAT is wrong with those people?
When Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon,
a mere 50 or so members of the US military
TOOK ONLY TWO WEEKS TO ID 184 BODIES.
Furthermore,
the same Penta-group were working the victims of Flight 93,
at the same time.

The slobs in New York STILL haven't completed the job.
This is why the world needs the US military.
The boys at Dover could probably wrap this whole thing up in about a year.

[hunter]

5. "This is why the world needs the US military????"

Yeah, right.

I am skepitical about your "boys at Dover" too. Could their work pass random double-blind tests with adequate controls? Furthermore, how many grieving families ever have their loved-ones unrecognizable remains tested at other labs?

Sorry, your post tipped me over.

I am furious every time this catastrophe is used as a "photo-op" for some group or special interest.

DNA testing is an utterly insignificant aspect of this catastrophe. Most of the dead will never be identified by any means, and thousands of bodies have been forever taken by the sea and will NEVER be found.

I'm gonna take some deep breaths and move on. I've already spent too much time on this one post.

If anyone reading this has the resources, please think about donating to the relief efforts next year too, when this disaster is "old news."

[lazarus]

6. They likely

had lists to work with for ID'ing the bodies.

When you don't even have a list to start from....