A non-pandemic, non-H5N1 article piqued my interest the first of the month but I didn’t have the time to devote to the subject then. This Sunday I do.
August 8, 2008
Fingerprint Test Tells What a Person Has Touched
With a new analytical technique, a fingerprint can now reveal much more than the identity of a person. It can now also identify what the person has been touching: drugs, explosives or poisons, for example.
Writing in Friday’s issue of the journal Science, R. Graham Cooks, a professor of chemistry at Purdue University, and his colleagues describe how a laboratory technique, mass spectrometry, could find a wider application in crime investigations.
[...]In the experiments described in the Science paper, solutions containing tiny amounts of various chemicals including cocaine and the explosive RDX were applied to the fingertips of volunteers. The volunteers touched surfaces like glass, paper and plastic. The researchers then analyzed the fingerprints.
Because the spatial resolution is on the order of the width of a human hair, the Desi technique did not just detect the presence of, for instance, cocaine, but literally showed a pattern of cocaine in the shape of the fingerprint, leaving no doubt who had left the cocaine behind.The equipment to perform such tests is already commercially available, although prohibitively expensive for all but the largest crime laboratories. Smaller, cheaper, portable versions of such analyzers are probably only a couple of years away.
[...]As it becomes cheaper and more widely available, the Desi technology has potential ethical implications, Dr. Cooks said. Instead of drug tests, a company could surreptitiously check for illegal drug use by its employees by analyzing computer keyboards after the workers have gone home, for instance.
The article in its entirety….
Setting aside the fact I have major issues with employers who can [and do] fire employees for behaviors engaged in while not “on the clock”, and setting aside my “issues” with this country’s hyper-paranoia over drug use in general coupled with our schizophrenic treatment of alcoholic beverage consumption versus recreational drug use. Setting all that aside I was prickled by this “new and improved” technology.
Until the day it is proved that hand contamination via casual contact is not an issue we do not need to introduce this new and improved technology that “leaves no doubt who left the cocaine behind”.
From FoxNews.com :
Study: U.S. Paper Money Covered With Cocaine
Wednesday, August 06, 2008 By Jeanna Bryner
Paper money contains high traces of cocaine, regardless of whether or not the paper money came into direct contact with the drug.
U.S. bills take the top spot, covered in the greatest amount of the illegal powder, while euro notes issued in Spain are the most highly contaminated in Europe, a new study finds.
The findings, detailed in the latest issue of the journal Trends in Analytical Chemistry, reflect the popularity of the illicit drug, the researchers say.
I have never used cocaine and I don’t imagine that I ever will, but I would like to hope that if the day ever dawns that I get fired, or worse, arrested, for cocaine use I will at least be guilty of using it, notwithstanding what my fingerprints may or may not say. I hope the same for everyone “out there”, at least until the day we bring sanity to our drug policy, but that is a post for another quiet Sunday sometime in the future of this Brave New World of ours.
SZ