Chairman, Nigerian Medical Association (NMA), Lagos state chapter and Consultant Pathologist, Department of Pathology and Forensic Medicine, Lagos State University College of Medicine, Ikeja, Lagos, Dr Francis Faduyile in this interview with LARA ADEJORO tells why DNA test can’t be done in Nigeria.
On forensic medicine in Nigeria, what are the challenges and way forward?
The state of forensic medicine in Nigeria is low because forensic is how to use medical issues to preserve and majorly, it starts from the police officers being able to know what are the medical legal importance and the awareness within the public is still very low. If there’s an accident or something that has occurred, you see many people just rush in there touching and disrupting the state of things and these are some of the things that will not help us to have good forensic investigation. So, awareness of people is also low.
Most importantly, is the first responder which is the police officer, I’m aware that the police curriculum doesn’t have thorough training to tell people what to look out for, how to look for it and how to research them.
After that, we come to the personnel; Nigeria does not have the necessary personnel that can help in forensic investigation. We need forensic anthropologist; forensic entomologist, forensic archaeologist and toxicologist, forensic chemist, all these discipline within forensic department are not readily available.
We have very few forensic pathologists who can work around these things with support from other sub-speciality, which are not readily available and among those who are forensic pathologists that are around, the government has not provided the adequate environment to perform optimally by having a good morgue, by having some of the equipments needed for scientific investigation to aid teaching, many of the forensic laboratories, autopsy room should have a mobile x-ray, many of them should have either auxiliary investigation that can be easily done; all these things are not available and also have a functional mortuary is a sin qua non to having an effective forensic investigation and all these things are not in place.
Again, on the part of the government, there has not been a strong legislation of the government to put things in place so that we have a regulation and a structured pathway in which we will do all these investigations.
So what we see generally are people who do things according to their knowledge or according to their whims and caprices and these will not help, cannot help and has not helped forensic investigations in Nigeria.
Taking you on the Lagos plane crash, one would say the Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) results should have been back earlier, what has caused the delay?
When you say that it should be back in the country and it has shown that the forensic laboratory to do this DNA test is not in Nigeria and anything can happen and I must say that these are parts of the problems militating against the full large scale of forensic investigation, we cannot do a forensic analysis in terms of DNA and when you want to do Disaster Victim Identification (DVI) especially on people who cannot be easily recognized, the forensic ondonthologist to have the dental record which we don’t have in Nigeria, or have other medical record which is not commonly done, that is centralised in Nigeria and to be able to have other ante-mortem status or testing of the patient that is used to cross check what you have seen in post mortem; all these are not in place and that do not aid the ability to do that so we are left to do the DNA to confirm and anything that is not within you, there is little you can do.
For you to send them abroad, you need to put them in cold chain, go through DHL, send them there, they will have some query, they will have to phone or send email, you have to reply and all those ones can cause delay unlike if it is just next door that you can go there and resolve the whole issue.
You talked about insufficient pathologists, can you specifically say the number of them we have in Nigeria and how many would we be needing for the Nigeria population?
At least for a start, we need a forensic pathologist in each state and that is grossly inadequate that means if we have to go through that one, we need at least 40 but in Nigeria, I don’t think we have up to 5 or 6, it shows that it’s grossly inadequate.
What is the latest research in forensic medicine people should be aware of?
I think it is the awareness of the political class that we need to do for them to appreciate and I’m happy that Ekiti State is borrowing a leaf from Lagos State that is in the forefront, coroner autopsies and having inquest done and follow the proper thing to do in forensic investigation, Ekiti State is in the state of upgrading in such a way that it can stand the test of current reality in the country.