Book reviews 275

are given (e.g. skin colour as a marker of susceptibility to skin cancer) are rele-
vant to non-primates which have been studied less intensively than man.
The final chapter addresses general methodological issues in molecular epide-
miology. These include choice and stability of markers, biological variability,
sample size determination, and assay and interpretation of markers.
Although this book is exclusively medical, it provides an excellent general in-
troduction to marker technology, which could be read with profit by all veteri-
nary graduates. Moreover, the authors have succeeded in their task of bridging
the gap between the molecular biologist and epidemiologist, and the latter in par-
ticular, will learn much from it.

MICHAEL THRUSFIELD
Department of Veterinary Clinical Studies
Royal (Dick) School of VeterinaryStudies
University of Edinburgh
Edinburgh
UK

Entomology and death

Entomology & Death--A Procedural Guide. E. Paul Catts and Neal H. Haskell
(Editors), Joyce's Print Shop Inc., 1990, 182 pp., paperback US$25.00, ISBN
0-9628696-0-0.

There are times in the life of every epidemiologist when one is faced with con-
flicting or absent evidence of the time of death, from the stream of consciousness
of a self-exculpatory weekend 'rancher' who cannot quite remember when he last
saw his now very dead cow to the trail of white tailed deer dead from EHD and
scattered through a forest. Usually the fact and cause of death are all one needs,
but occasionally an exact chronology is necessary; for example, if one were trying
to sort out the order and approximate dates of death of bison dying from anthrax
in the North West Territories, when the bodies have been missed by the routine
helicopter surveillance, to determine the importance of tabanids in the spread of
this disease. In less exotic circumstances, we sometimes have to know whether an
animal died today, yesterday, or the day before. This, then, is the book that you
must have.
There are a number of good reasons for using insects and other arthropods
when investigating deaths:
( 1 ) Insects are usually the first to find a carcass, even when it is hidden. Blow
flies may arrive and begin laying eggs within minutes of death. Obviously,
one must be cognizant of the possibility of fly-strike.
(2) Insect species arrive in a predictable order. These entomological waves can
both time death and the incidents associated with it.
2 76 Book reviews

(3) The absence of insects in apparent circumstances when they should be pres-
ent can be telling. Similarly their usual distribution on, under, and around
the carcass is known and any departures are informative. For example, mag-
gots are normally found about the head (e.g. eyes and mouth ) and perineum,
and, therefore, any maggot-mass elsewhere may indicate ante-mortem trauma
or lesions. Field post-mortems of not-fresh carcasses tend to be rushed and
thus such evidence can be readily overlooked.

The USA is plagued by homicide. It has some 23 000 murders per year. This is
not the place to analyse the causes, but among them are two contributing factors.
It is not a densely populated country. In virtually every state there are places
where one can drive for extended periods out of sight of any house or habitation;
in contrast, the one time I experienced this in England was for only a couple of
miles when crossing the Penines. Secondly, I am told by my forensic entomolog-
ical colleague, Lamar Meek, that maggots can reduce a corpse to a bag of bones
in 5-7 days. Thus people can disappear with murder undiscovered and likely to
be repeated. This milieu has provided a wealth of opportunity and experience for
North American forensic entomologists. They are not the first, who seems to have
been Sung Tz'u, a Chinese 'death investigator' in the thirteenth century (Mc-
Knight, 1981 ), but ably represent a corps of experience. Much of this applied
knowledge has been obtained from the use of purposefully killed animals, usually
young pigs. As a result the basic information is directly applicable to veterinary
circumstances.
This manual covers carcass decomposition, and the importance of blow fly eggs,
maggots, and puparia, and beetles and other insects. There is an excellent illus-
trated chapter on their structure and biology. The illustrations are large, labelled,
adequately clear, and with sizes in millimetres. Fortunately, we can skip the in-
formative chapter on procedures at police controlled death scenes and concen-
trate on collecting appropriate samples from on, around, and under carcasses,
both in the field and at post-mortem. Unfortunately, it does not include more
recent knowledge on collecting pupae when the maggots have migrated some 5 or
more metres away from the carcass to hide and pupate. This may be important
as these can be older than pupae found next to the body. Their instructions for
rearing insects, processing litter and soil, preserving and labelling specimens are
straightforward and uncomplicated.
At this point the authors assume that the reader is an entomologist and com-
fortably informed as to the effects of ambient weather on the appearance of the
various instars and variance of the timing. The rest of us had better obtain the
necessary prior training or, like all epidemiologists, persuade another to contrib-
ute their professional entomological expertise. The manual has a glossary of com-
mon terms in forensic entomology, covering some 250 entomological, forensic,
and police terms, that are simply and clearly worded. So that one does not appear
to be a complete idiot, one would be wise to have read it before attempting to
recruit the entomologist. While there is a brief chapter on analysing the entomo-
logical data and estimating the duration of the post-mortem interval, it is not
 Book reviews 277

quite adequate if one wants narrow estimates. It is to be hoped that more detailed
information and tables will be provided in subsequent editions of this otherwise
most valuable manual. If one needs more forensic information, Simpson and
Knight ( 1985 ) is probably the best value but it has only six lines on maggots.
Some might be offended by the apparently light hearted drawings used in this
manual of corpses in varied circumstances. More realism would have been voy-
euristic. Violent death is neither tidy nor nice. These drawings are instructive and
make their various points economically and well. The editors and authors of this
useful text are to be congratulated.

MARTIN HUGH-JONES
Department of Epidemiology and Community Health
School of Veterinary Medicine
Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge, LA 70803
USA

References

McKnight, B.E., 1981. The Washing Away of Wrongs: Forensic Medicine in Thirteenth Century China.
Ann Arbor, University of Michigan, 181 pp.
Simpson, K. and Knight, B., 1985. Forensic Medicine, 9th edn. Edward Arnold Ltd., UK.