Heat stroke deaths caused by electric blankets: case report and review of the literature

Heat stroke is the most serious and potentially life-threatening condition of the heat-related illnesses. Heat stroke deaths caused by electric blanket are rarely reported. In this paper, we report 2 cases of fatal heat stroke caused by overheating from electric blankets in winter. One was a 41-year-old man who was found unresponsive in bed on an electric blanket. His wife shared the same bed with him and was found unconscious. The wife's axillary temperature was 40 degrees C (104 degrees C) when she was admitted to the hospital. She fully recovered after medical treatment. The husband was pronounced dead at scene, with rectal temperature at 41.2 degrees C (106.2 degrees C). The other was a 13-year-old girl who was found dead in bed on an electric blanket, with rectal temperature at 41 degrees C (105.8 degrees F). The literature is reviewed, and the pertinent findings, including scene investigations, postmortem examination, the risk and mechanism of fatal heat stroke caused by using electric blanket, are discussed.     

Acidosis, lactate, electrolytes, muscle enzymes, and other factors in the blood of Sus scrofa following repeated TASER exposures

Repeated exposure to electro-muscular incapacitating devices could result in repetitive, sustained muscle contraction, with little or no muscle recovery period. Therefore, rhabdomyolysis and other physiological responses, including acidosis, hyperkalaemia, and altered levels of muscle enzymes in the blood, would be likely to occur. Experiments were performed to investigate effects of repeated exposures of TASER International's Advanced TASER X26 on muscle contraction and resultant changes in blood factors in an anaesthetized swine model. A total of 10 animals were used. Six swine were exposed for 5 s, followed by a 5-s period of no exposure, repeatedly for 3 min. (In five of the animals, after a 1-h delay, a second 3-min exposure period was added.) The remaining four animals were used for an additional pilot study. All four limbs of each animal exhibited contraction even though the electrodes were positioned in areas at some distances from the limbs. The degree of muscle contraction generated during the second exposure period was significantly lower than that in the first exposure series. This finding was consistent with previous studies showing that prolonged activity in skeletal muscle will eventually result in a decline of force production. There were some similarities in blood sample changes in the current experiments with previous studies of muscular exercise. Thus problems concerning biological effects of repeated TASER exposures may be related, not directly to the "electric output" per se, but rather to the resulting contraction of muscles (and related interruption of respiration) and subsequent sequelae. Transient increases in hematocrit, potassium, and sodium were consistent with previous reports in the literature dealing with studies of muscle stimulation or exercise. It is doubtful that these short-term elevations would have any serious health consequences in a healthy individual. Blood pH was significantly decreased for 1h following exposure, but subsequently returned toward a normal level. Leg muscle contractions and decreases in respiration each appeared to contribute to the acidosis. Lactate was highly elevated, with a slow return (time course greater than 1 h) to baseline. Other investigators have reported profound metabolic acidosis during restraint-associated cardiac arrest. Since restraint often occurs immediately after TASER exposure, this issue should be considered in further development of deployment concepts. On the basis of the results of the current studies, the repeated use of electro-muscular incapacitating devices in a short period of time is, at least, feasible, with the caveat that some medical monitoring of subjects may be required (to observe factors such as lactate and acidosis).     

Discrimination of half-siblings when maternal genotypes are known

Given the DNA profiles of two individuals and one parent (say the mother) of each, we present likelihood ratios (LRs) comparing the hypothesis that they have the same father with the hypothesis of unrelated fathers. If the individuals have the same mother, the problem is to distinguish full- from half-siblings, otherwise we are comparing a half-sibling relationship with unrelated. We simulate STR profiles at up to 60 loci, based on allele proportions observed at 15 loci in three populations, and use them to approximate misclassification rates both for binary classification (e.g. "half-sib" versus "unrelated"), and when a third "cannot say" category is included. We find that reliable inferences in the absence of the mothers' profiles require many more STR loci than the 10-25 loci that are currently routinely available. However, profiling the two mothers conveys more discriminatory power than profiling the same number of additional loci in the individuals themselves. Our likelihood ratio formulas include a theta (or Fst) adjustment to allow for the individuals concerned to have recent shared ancestry (coancestry), relative to the population from which the allele frequency database is drawn. We illustrate that using an appropriate value of theta can reduce the average misclassification rate.     

Four X-chromosomal STRs and their allele frequencies in a Chinese population

X-chromosomal markers are particularly useful for solving complex problems relating to kinship and deficiency paternity analysis. In the present study, population genetics data of four X-chromosomal short tandem repeats (STRs) DXS8378, HPRTB, DXS7423 and DXS7132 were obtained by analyzing 500 unrelated Chinese individuals (250 males and 250 females). Population genetics data obtained from the Chinese were compared with those of the Asian and European population. Mutations in X-chromosomal markers were analyzed based on a total of 61 proven father-child and 45 proven mother-child pairs.