Background: Custodial populations are recognised as high-risk groups for blood-borne viral infections and tuberculosis, largely due to pre-incarceration behavioural and socio-demographic vulnerabilities. Custodial deaths often attract medico-legal scrutiny, yet systematic data examining infectious disease burden and its contribution to mortality remain limited. Objectives: To analyse the epidemiological profile of custodial deaths with respect to HIV, hepatitis C virus (HCV), tuberculosis (TB), and drug abuse; to assess infection clustering; and to examine their association with socio-demographic factors, custody status, terminal hospital stay, and cause of death. Materials and Methods: A retrospective analytical study was conducted on 143 custodial deaths at a tertiary care centre in North India. Anonymised data were extracted from medico-legal autopsy records, hospital files, and laboratory reports. Results: HIV, HCV and TB were detected in 33.6%, 28.0% and 27.3% of cases respectively. Drug abuse showed a strong association with HIV, HCV and HIV–HCV co-infection (p < 0.001). Multiple infections were present in 21.7% of cases, with HIV–HCV–TB triple infection in 14.0%. Natural causes accounted for 93.7% of deaths, predominantly due to opportunistic infections, pulmonary tuberculosis and chronic liver disease. Conclusion: Custodial deaths were largely attributable to advanced pre-existing infectious disease burden compounded by drug abuse, underscoring the need for early screening, harm reduction and integrated care in custodial settings.
Objectives: Detecting humanDNA in a mosquito's bloodmeal is a crucial aspect of forensic entomology that canaidin identifying crime scenes and serve as evidence in court. Mosquitoes serve as a potential source of human DNA due to their feeding habits. Methods: This study utilized electrophoretic and molecular techniques to validate the effectiveness of mosquito blood meal in crime investigation and jurisprudence.The sample size was calculated using the G*Power formula at a 0.05 confidence level, yielding samples offifty (50) human subjects and fifty (50) mosquitoes. Similarly, the methodologies approved by the World Health Organization (WHO) were used for the laboratory analysis.Data analysis was performed on SPSS(version18-20).Gel electrophoresis confirmed the presence of DNA in a mosquito blood meal. Furthermore, the Sanger Nucleotide Sequencing alignment was performed on the NCBI platform, upon which the phylogenetic tree was built. Results: The result affirmed the presence of homo sapiens DNA in the BLAST search conducted. Therefore, blood-fed mosquitoes found at a crime scene are forensically valuable, as they can indicate the presence of human blood, but are hampered by the lack of human identity indication due to method limitations. Novelty: This study identified human detection in Anopheles mosquito blood meals using natural, real-time scenarios.
Background: Adolescent suicide is a growing public health concern worldwide, with hanging being one of the most commonly employed methods. Despite its increasing incidence, limited information is available regarding the psychosocial circumstances preceding adolescent suicidal hanging, particularly in India. Psychological autopsy is a valuable investigative tool for reconstructing the biological, psychological, social, and environmental factors associated with suicide. Aim: To identify the socio-demographic characteristics and psychosocial risk factors associated with suicidal hanging among adolescents using the psychological autopsy approach. Materials and Methods: A cross-sectional observational study was conducted in the Department of Forensic Medicine and Toxicology, AIIMS, New Delhi, India, from October 2021 to April 2022. Fifty-nine consecutive cases of suicidal hanging among adolescents aged 10–19 years were included. Following written informed consent, psychological autopsies were performed through face-to-face interviews with close biological relatives using a semi-structured questionnaire. Information obtained from police records, crime scene investigations, and medico-legal autopsies was integrated to reconstruct the circumstances surrounding each death. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics. Results: Late adolescents (17–19 years) constituted the majority of victims (62.7%), with females predominating (59.3%). School dropout was observed in 32.2% of cases, while 22.0% belonged to families with financial difficulties. Depressed mood (15.3%), loss of interest in daily activities (20.3%), previous self-harming behaviour (15.3%), suicidal ideation (11.9%), suicide notes (11.9%), and substance use (17.0%) were identified in a proportion of victims. A family history of suicide was present in 8.5% of cases. Menstrual-related emotional distress (27.1%) and romantic relationship problems (8.5%) were the most frequently identified psychosocial stressors among female adolescents. Most suicides occurred at home (88.1%), with cloth serving as the most common ligature material (74.6%) and ceiling fans as the most frequent suspension point (67.8%). In 74.6% of cases, no definite precipitating stressor could be identified. Conclusion: Adolescent suicidal hanging is a multifactorial phenomenon influenced by interacting psychological, familial, social, and environmental factors. Psychological autopsy provides valuable insights into these antecedent circumstances and facilitates the identification of modifiable risk factors that may inform targeted suicide prevention strategies, improve medico-legal investigations, and strengthen adolescent mental health interventions.
Objective: To assess the associations of mortuary ambient temperature, relative humidity and gross nutritional status with the stage of rigor mortis, pattern of postmortem lividity and lividity fixation in medicolegal autopsies. Methods: This prospective autopsy-based observational study included 100 consecutive eligible cases with a documented time of death over 18 months in the Mahakaushal region of Central India. Rigor mortis was staged by systematic manual examination; lividity was classified as mottled, coalesced or fully developed, with fixation assessed by a one-minute blanching test. Mortuary temperature and humidity were measured digitally, and nutritional status was graded from gross body habitus. Sparse contingency tables were evaluated by Monte Carlo exact conditional tests; association strength was summarized with Cramer's V. Results: Rigor mortis was fully developed in 60.0% (95% CI, 50.2%-69.1%), lividity was fully developed in 54.0% (95% CI, 44.3%-63.4%), and lividity was fixed in 69.0% (95% CI, 59.4%-77.2%) of cases. Fully developed rigor occurred in 80.4% of cases examined at 30-35°C and all cases at 35-40°C; fixed lividity occurred in 84.3% and 100%, respectively. Temperature and humidity were associated with all three postmortem outcomes (all p
Background: Trauma radiographs may reveal retained bullets or metallic fragments, and early localization can influence further imaging, surgical planning, safety assessment, and forensic documentation. Methods: This feasibility study used a fully synthetic, computer-generated tabular dataset of 400 case-level records divided into 240 training-design records, 60 validation-design records, and a 100-record held-out test set. The 400 records were not pixel-level radiographs: no DICOM, PNG, or other X-ray images were generated for model training, and no YOLOv9 neural network was trained. Instead, ground-truth labels, confidence scores, simulated detector outputs, a simulated time-constrained radiologist first pass, object-level matches, and processing times were produced by a fixed-seed probabilistic simulation (seed 9173) to demonstrate an evaluation framework. The test set comprised 70 projectile-positive and 30 projectile-negative records. Results: The simulated AI output yielded 65 true positives, 5 false negatives, 3 false positives, and 27 true negatives, corresponding to 92.0% accuracy, 92.9% sensitivity, 90.0% specificity, 95.6% precision, and a 94.2% F1 score; ROC-AUC was 0.972. The simulated radiologist first pass was correct in 83.0% of test records. In paired correctness analysis, AI alone was correct in 12 records and the radiologist alone in 3 (exact McNemar p=0.035). Of 145 synthetic annotated fragments, 136 were matched, with mean IoU 0.828, mAP@0.50=0.937, and mAP@0.50:0.95=0.593. Conclusion: These values are simulation outputs and do not constitute evidence that YOLOv9 detects projectiles on patient radiographs. The study demonstrates a reproducible analysis plan that requires validation on authentic multicentre radiographs, independent annotation, external testing, calibration, human-factors evaluation, and forensic governance before any clinical use.
