A STIFF drink before you meet your maker might confuse police investigating your death, experiments on pigs suggest.
Finding out when someone died can be difficult if the body has lain undiscovered for some time. Forensic scientists often use maggots found on a corpse as a guide, as different fly species lay their eggs at different stages of a body's decomposition.
But that relies on knowing how long the maggots take to develop. Temperature and the presence of illicit drugs in the flesh make a difference. Now Kimberly Tabor at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg and colleagues have found alcohol does too.
The team fed four pigs vodka-laced fruit juice, then injected them with ethanol. This put their blood alcohol level at between 0.14 and 0.25 per cent, over three times the legal driving limit in some US states, Tabor told the American Academy of Forensic Sciences conference in Dallas, Texas, last month.
After killing the pigs, the team put blowfly eggs on samples of flesh. Third instar larvae, which feed the most, took around 15 hours longer to develop on flesh from intoxicated pigs than on that from pigs not given alcohol.
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