Delay in Jahi McMath Autopsy Complicates Cause of Death Ruling: ExpertsBy Lisa Fernandez | Monday, Jan 6, 2014 | Updated 5:33 PM PST
The three-week battle to keep a brain-dead Oakland girl on a ventilator could complicate efforts to determine Jahi McMath's precise cause of death, some experts say.The Alameda County Coroner issued a death certificate for the 13-year-old girl Friday, 23 days after Jahi was declared brain dead, but said the document is incomplete because no cause of death has been determined pending an autopsy, which has yet to take place.
"When you don't get an exam relatively quickly, it puts everything into dispute," said Arthur Caplan, head of the Division of Bioethics at New York University Langone Medical Center in New York City and a regular NBC News contributor. "The evidence into what caused the bleeding will be harder to determine, and the ability to show what happened - and the liability - will become way more difficult. The more time you delay, the more difficult it is to establish cause of death because you've lost control of some of the evidence."
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P. Michael Murphy, past president of the International Association of Coroners and Medical Examiners Association and the current Coroner of Clark County in Las Vegas, acknowledged that there can be subtle to pronounced changes that occur to a body after brain death. He has no personal knowledge of Jahi's case, but has been following it closely in the media.
But he added that forensic pathologists are typically "very good at deciphering" how people died in various "degrees and conditions." Murphy also added that, in most cases, hospitals keep meticulous details of a patient's records, which often aid medical examiners on what led up to death.
"The quicker the exam, the better, certainly," Murphy said by phone on Monday. "But they are trained to report on what they find."
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