Biobank Helps Sweden ID Tsunami Victims

STOCKHOLM, Sweden — Swedish police, faced with months of work identifying the bodies the many Swedes missing and feared dead in the southern Asian tsunamis, have received unprecedented access to a national biobank of blood samples from a third of the country’s citizens to speed up the process.

Lawmakers last month passed a temporary change to the law regarding the storage of blood samples, giving police the ability to match DNA from bodies in Thailand with blood samples in the biobank, which originally was intended for medical research.

More than a month after the Dec. 26 tidal wave, 569 Swedes are missing and feared dead in the disaster, which claimed at least 157,000 lives.

While giving police access to the biobank has been controversial in the past – raising privacy issues and questions of a "big brother" society – it has proven to be the most reliable way to identify small children, who do not have dental records.

"This will speed things up tremendously," said Ulf Palm, a spokesman for the Swedish ID commission that is identifying bodies in Thailand. "It’s the only thing we have to go on."

With a recent tightening of Thai restrictions on how to identify a body before it can be transported to another country, lawmakers hope the biobank will bring childen’s bodies back to their parents quicker.

"There was a number of parents who had made a preliminary ID of their children, but who couldn’t get them home," said Ingrid Burman, head of the parliament committee that auhorized the change, which is valid until June 30, 2006.

Sweden was one of the Western countries hardest hit by the tsunami, and of those still missing, police said 115 were under the age of 15.

Police spokeswoman Carolina Ekeus said blood samples from 20 missing children have been pulled from the biobank, and will be used to match with DNA from bodies in Thailand.

"There will be more samples pulled with time," she said.

The biobank, called PKU, contains blood samples from almost every person born in Sweden since 1975, the year it was created, purely as a medical resource.

Blood tests had long been used to detect five rare diseases that can be easily treated if discovered early, said Ulrika von Doebeln, head of the PKU laboratory at the Karolinska Sjukhuset in Huddinge, south of Stockholm.

The samples were stored so doctors could go back and later check whether a person’s disease could be traced to a fetal stage, she said.

Only those who specifically ask not to be put in the biobank are left out.

But as police rely increasingly on DNA samples to catch crooks, the biobank has lately raised concerns about privacy. In 2003, police were given access to the blood sample of Mijailo Mijailovic when he was their leading suspect in the fatal stabbing of Foreign Minister Anna Lindh.

Police matched Mijailovic’ blood sample with DNA found on the crime scene, which helped prosecutors build their case against him. Mijailovic, faced with the DNA evidence, later confessed.

While Swedes were relieved to see the crime solved, the hospital’s decision to grant police access to the biobank drew wide criticism and concerns it could regularly be used against citizens suspected of crimes.

While a law from 2003 states that hospitals’ biobanks should only be used for medical research, police and the hospital said the country’s penal code superseded that law and granted police access.

"I thought that was highly unfortunate," said Burman, adding that a clarification of the law concerning biobanks is expected this year, which will likely bar police from using it for criminal investigations.

"We don’t want to open the PKU-register to the police," she said. "This is just about helping parents getting their kids home."

When media reported on the police’s use of the biobank against Mijailovic, hundreds requested to have their samples destroyed. Since then, 533 people have been taken out of the biobank, von Doebeln said.

Von Doebeln said that while the hospital had no say in the matter, she had no qualms about the biobank being used in Thailand.

"In this case, we’re dealing with very special circumstances," she said. "This is a disaster, and it’s about doing something good for others. I can’t imagine anyone having a problem with that. When it’s for catching crooks, it’s a different situation. Then you’re using the test against someone."