Tragically, a 23-year old football player died after a game this weekend. The autopsy did not reveal a cause of death.
However, the coroner said they had to wait 3 to 6 weeks to get toxicology results back.
Why does this take so long?
Does the test itself actually take that long to perform? Or are there just a few labs in the US that perform these tests? If it was really important, for example, the President of the United States just dropped dead, would the process be able to be hurried along?
I just had the same question regarding the Benoit murder/suicide…
I don’t know about every toxic angent out there but the typical drug tests can come back very fast like in a day or less and they are performed in countless places because some people need a clean screen for their job or other conditions.
This is not the kind of analytical testing that I do, but here is an educated WAG:
While tragic, this death is just one of several other unexplained ones that need to be dealt with, and frankly, if every sample sent to the lab was “Rush”, then none of them would be, so it probably is simply being dealt with as a regular sample for toxicology testing.
I suspect there is a chain of evidence issue as well, so the sample(s) need to be collected, documented, transfered to a delivery person/company, documented, moved to the tox lab, documented, stored in appropriate conditions the whole time (documented), removed for testing (documented), analyzed on instruments X,Y and Z (all of them documented, not to mentioned calibrated and validated), results reviewed (documented), approved (documented), sent back to the investigators (you guessed it, documented), interpreted (documented!) and then made public or go through whatever channels this information needs to go through at this point. All of this is likely verified and cosigned as well, and often done during business hours (8-5), so there are a LOT of steps that could slow things down. Depending on the analyses conducted, several other tests might be done based upon their results, and all this takes time.
I am not familiar with the tests and instruments involved, but several might have long run times (in my field, pharmaceutical chemistry, our shortest HPLC runs in which anything might be quantitative are at least 2.5 hours long, due to the steps we have to do to prove the instrument is working; typically, I tend to run 7-20 hour long runs, not including the approximately 3-8 hours of sample prep, instrument set up, and, of course, documentation).
The quality control systems in labs like this are often very rigorous, since one mistake can lead to so many problems, from extended analysis times due to having to repeat, to damaging the reputation of the victim (he was a crack addict… oh wait, no, that was someone else’s sample!) to falsely accusing someone of a crime or action which might have affected the victim.
Drug testing for jobs is different… I’m pretty sure for the most part these are pre-packaged, validated, but with minimal accuracy, tests, which essentially can tell you Yes/No about the presence of a substance, and might have a result that can give you a range of concentration, but can’t give any level of precision on that reading (such as 90-100% substance X, but not enough precision to tell you it’s actually 97.473%)
As I said, educated WAG… a lot of this description does apply to the work I do!
Routine screening for common drugs (a urine drug screen) can be done in minutes in most hospital laboratories.
Testing for more exotic or rare toxins may only be done at one lab in the whole country. This holds true for many non-drug related tests as well. I know of several tests where the ‘turn around time’ is two weeks.