Murder or suicide?

A lady named Omana was murdered and was dropped from the terrace to make it look like a suicide. The case was closed as suicide and later it was re-opened and given to the premier investigation agency. Investigation started where a humanoid dummy experiment was conducted to confirm whether it was a murder or suicide?

They took the dummies of same height and weight to roof and dropped one straight down as if it jumped, and threw the other off the roof as if someone had thrown the body. They find that Omana’s body landed approximately the same place as the dummy that was thrown and concluded that she could not have jumped that far off the roof on her own. The case was cracked! The premier investigation agency CBI concluded that Omana was murdered based on the further detailed investigation. It is a wonderful example of a good investigation.

The events are picturized in Oru CBI Diary Kurippu [A CBI diary entry] a 1988 Indian Malayalam-language film.

Sharing another interesting real incident. One day, the car division of General Motors received a complaint, saying, “My Pontiac car doesn’t like vanilla ice-cream.” General Motors, first ignored his complaint. The customer also knew, his complaint is silly. So, the owner of the car decided to write again clearly.

He told them about how his family ate ice-cream every day after dinner. And each day, they would decide on a different flavour, but after he bought a new Pontiac car, he was facing a strange problem. The car refused to start whenever he bought vanilla ice-cream. If it was any other flavor, there wasn’t a problem. While most people would have called him crazy, General Motors decided to send an engineer to his house anyway.

To the engineer’s surprise, the complaint turned out to be true. When the engineer got vanilla ice-cream, the car actually didn’t start. There was nothing left unchecked – the gas used, the car model, the time it took to drive back and forth.

Finally, the engineer realized, it took the man a lot longer to buy other flavors of ice-cream. But because vanilla was stored in a different case in the front of the store, it took little time. And this was just the clue he needed.

The answer was vapor lock!

Because of the car stopping and starting constantly, fuel would turn to vapor and couldn’t move through the system, and causing the engine to die.

Because vanilla ice-cream took little time to buy, the engine didn’t have time to cool down. And so, the mystery was solved.

These are examples of how investigations have to be done to find out the exact root cause, whatever the magnitude it may be! Investigations arising out of deviations are really interesting in pharmaceutical industry however pharmaceutical industry doesn’t favour deviations in first place as it needs lot of time, patience, in-depth research and collaboration with all stake holders. Only investigations which are correctly done can identify the exact root cause and / or underlying factors. If the root causes are correctly identified, then the deviation would not be recurring. Corrective and preventive action [CAPA] for the occurred deviation will become effective. In most of the cases, the root cause is not correctly identified and closed due to time factor and finally end up as failure during the CAPA effectiveness check. Few deviations like Microbial excursions takes lot of time due to the incubation time factor and fighting the unknown evil and poses a huge challenge in investigations.

Appropriate tools should be used for investigations. It is not good to have increased deviations during the manufacturing operations. Application of QBD [Quality by design], robust microbial monitoring program, well established preventive maintenance program, strong and detailed, yet simplified Standard Operating Procedures [SOP’s], effective training, periodic shut downs, adequate manpower resources play an important role in controlling the deviations during the manufacturing operations.

Note-The images given for representation in this blog are taken from Google Images. Many thanks for Google.