Understanding unidentified human remains investigations through the United States census data

The impacts of governing agency: A comparison of resources in the patchwork of medicolegal death investigation systems

“…This and other studies have demonstrated the dire state of the U.S. MDI system [ 5 , 10 , 14 , 28 , 29 , 36 ], particularly as it relates to basic infrastructure like computerized recordkeeping systems. Federal agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are heeding the call and providing grant opportunities to remedy some of the problems.…”

“…In the United States, medical examiner and coroner (MEC) offices are positioned at the crossroads of public health and public safety because they conduct formal medicolegal death investigations (MDIs) surrounding the circumstances of a death and determine the cause and manner [ 1 ]. As such, MDIs and their resulting data can inform a wide variety of relevant topics including the ongoing opioid overdose epidemic [ [2] , [3] , [4] , [5] , [6] ], COVID-19 and other pandemics [ [7] , [8] , [9] , [10] ], deaths in custody [ 11 ], deaths associated with natural [ 12 ] and artificial [ 13 ] disasters, families seeking answers about long-term missing loved ones [ 14 ], late-life suicide [ 15 ], preventable deaths from extremity wounds [ 16 ], and firearm-related deaths [ 17 ], among many other critical topics. Informing public health with autopsies and other MDI processes helps detect novel diseases, monitor the spread of infectious disease, register deaths related to epidemics reliably, correct clinical misdiagnoses, identify prognostic and risk factors, and identify target sites for infections and disease to enable better, more timely treatment [ 8 ].…”

Mass fatality and disaster response preparedness across medical examiner and coroner offices in the United States

“…This analysis technique is where individual values are secondary to inferences of a larger population's parameters; a missing value of one respondent is replaced with the value from a similar respondent within the same dataset. The 2021 BJS report contains further information regarding the imputation procedures used for the 2018 CMEC administrations [ 2 , 5 , 51 ].…”

An interdisciplinary forensic approach for human remains identification and missing persons investigations

“…The use of long‐range familial/kinship analysis (termed FIGG) has assisted to resolve a number of UHR cases in the US (Rodriguez et al, 2022), with more countries beginning to evaluate its use for unidentified and missing persons investigations (Tillmar et al, 2020; Ward, 2022). By combining the use of advanced sequencing technologies such as microarrays or whole genome sequencing (WGS) to generate dense KI SNP profiles with long‐range familial/kinship searching of these profiles on private and public genealogy databases, there is now the opportunity to identify distant genetic relatives of UHR beyond what is possible using law enforcement DNA databases alone.…”

“…For example, national databases containing searchable information such as locations, clothing, age, sex, ancestry, medical and dental records, and DNA profiles related to both unidentified and missing persons could help narrow a pool of potential candidates once the relevant comparative profiling information becomes available. Many authorities are advocating for the use of centralized databases to create robust information management systems and biometric data comparison platforms for identification efforts (ICRC, 2022;T A B L E 5 A summary of the various forensic profiling methods currently available to support the interdisciplinary examination of skeletonized human remains in order to establish multiple and different lines of evidence for identification Rodriguez et al, 2022;Ward, 2018)…”