(Isabel Le Blanc-Louvry and colleagues, Forensic Science International)
Two research papers published this week throw further light on the health risks of the Taser stun gun. This striking image shows the central issue examined in one of the papers: what happened when a barbed dart fired by a police Taser struck a 27-year-old man on the side of the head. Although Isabel Le Blanc-Louvry and colleagues at the department of forensic medicine at Rouen University Hospital in France do not reveal when or where this occured, they say the victim had been drunk and resisted police requests for his ID. The police fired the pneumatically powered Taser to incapacitate and subdue him - but somehow nobody noticed a dart remained stuck in his head, until he later went to hospital complaining of a persistent headache.
In the ER, the dart was found to "have penetrated the frontal part of the skull and damaged the underlying frontal lobe", the team report in Forensic Science International. "We observed that the length of the Taser dart is sufficient to allow brain penetration," they write. The man made a full recovery.
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