Forensic toxicology is the field of science in which toxicology is combined with other, similar sciences like pharmacology, forensic medicine, metabolomics, or clinical chemistry. Forensic toxicology uses these sciences and others to find and analyze harmful materials in the human body, such as drugs and poisons. Primarily used by healing examiners, detectives, and doctors to ascertain how an private died, it regularly serves as scientific evidence in criminal cases to prove guilt or exonerate. Learn more about forensic toxicology and how it helps solves cases.
Forensic toxicologists regularly work in tandem with other law obligation professionals: chiefly forensic pathologists, Csi personnel, homicide detectives, and other types of healing and law obligation authorities.
Chemicals and Biological Specimens ordinarily Used to Prove or Disprove Causation
The modern forensic toxicologist has at his or her disposal years of training and very sophisticated technology to conclude causes of death. Glamorized to an extent by Hollywood, they're able to find toxins other harmful substances in roughly any part of the body, including:
• From oral fluid, which includes saliva and is also known as 'ultra filtrates'
• The eyeball's vitreous humour
• Gastric contents (what the deceased recently ate or ingested)
• Urine from the bladder
• Blood (which the most ordinarily used specimen, especially in determining a person's blood alcohol content, or Bac, either while the branch is still alive or post-mortem).
• Hair follicles, which are especially useful containers of drugs and other toxins in branch who were long-time users of drugs or consumed high quantities of them.
Types of criminal cases where this range of toxicology is especially useful (and common) include those that involve drug abuse (either prescribe or illicit road drugs), suspected poisoning, toxic mold or asbestos exposure, lead toxicity exposure, or alcohol abuse or poisoning.
Biological and chemical samples are forensically tested and then analyzed using a myriad of analytical techniques, important ones including:
• Gas or liquid chromatography
• Spectroscopy
• Solid phase extraction
• Spectrophotometry (electromagnetic spectroscopy)
• Scanning electron microscopy (Sem)
• Potassium permanganate staining (mainly in forensic entomology)
• Reinsch Testing
• Small angle X-ray scattering (Saxs) or X-ray diffraction
Famous Cases
Forensic toxicologists have helped solve many important crimes. A few of the most renowned ones include the O.J. Simpson case, the 2003 New Sweden, Maine case (in which one man of a small church died from arsenic poisoning and many others became violently ill), and the infamous Donald Harvey (aka 'Angel of Death') case of 1987 and '88.
