Ethanol concentration decreasing rate in biomedia during elimination phase (a review)
Solving the question of drunken drivers’ quilt, courts often ask the experts how can they characterize the state of accused person at the moment of accident on the base of data on alcohol in expired air or other biological samples, obtained some time after accident. To answer the question the calculations are performed after Widmark equation that is widely using all over the world. One of the members of this equation is the slope of concentration — time data plots during elimination phase, denoted by b 60, which has been investigated in hundreds of studies. Various background sources quote different both average population b 60 values and their confidence intervals. In the contemporary court practice in Russia, experts use different sources so their conclusions often depend on the occasional availability of this or that data source. In the present work, together with short review of available data on b 60 in biological media, the criteria for data selection are formulated, aimed to unify court judgments, useful for calculations in legally relevant cases, also as the recommendations are given to use the relevant sources of data. 