Survey of Toxicologic Testing Practices for a Violent Death Surveillance System

Abstract

To explore the comparability of postmortem forensic toxicologic testing across jurisdictions, the authors administered a survey to 11 laboratories serving pilot sites for a violent death reporting system. With few exceptions, all sites tested for the same substances but did not use the same methodology. Limit of detection thresholds for drugs of abuse and psychoactive medications varied up to 30-fold, limiting the comparability of cross-jurisdictional toxicologic data.