"Hair-samples will show if the children were influenced by drugs"

This was a headline in one Swedish afternoon paper on February 5^th. It was about a murder in Knutby, north of Stockholm in Sweden, on January 10^th 2004, which has attracted a lot of attention. Two persons were shot in their beds, and a pair of children, five and eight years old, were asleep and did not wake up by the shots. They also seemed very drowsy and difficult to wake up when the police arrived. It was therefore suspected that they were influenced by drugs on the night of the murder, and samples of the children’s hair were sent for analysis. 

Analyses did not, however, show any trace of drugs.

We have discussed the possibilities of publishing articles about something of current interest when a new issue of Bioscience Explained is published.

In Sweden analyses of hair are made at the Department of Forensic Chemistry at the National Board of Forensic Medicine, in the city of Linköping. Robert Kronstrand, Ph.D., works at this institute and has written an article about hair and drugs in this issue of Bioscience Explained.

Robert Kronstrand is a member of the International Association of Forensic Toxicologists (TIAFT), the Society of Forensic Toxicologists (SOFT), the American Association of Forensic Sciences and the Society of Hair Testing for which he also is a director of the board.

The year 2000, he was awarded the TIAFT young scientist award for best published paper, and in 2001 he was also given an Educational Research Award by SOFT.

Elisabeth Strömberg

Editor - Bioscience Explained

March 2004