The importance of autopsy in epidemics
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autopsy
epidemic
covid-19
guatemala
Abstract
It is irrefutably documented that the autopsy has served as a guarantee of quality in the practice of medicine. Despite the multiple technological advances in clinical studies, the margin of diagnostic error, compared to the autopsy diagnosis, is very high, even in developed countries. That is why we consider that the postmortem study should be privileged, so that the medicine increases its quality and has more effective treatments, since it has objective findings on the pathophysiology of diseases, especially in deaths from unknown causes.
At the current time of the Covid-19 pandemic, some countries have made the decision not to allow autopsies, which limits adequately investigating the pathophysiology of the disease and seeking adequate treatments. Autopsies have been shown to reveal the exact cause of death in a high percentage of cases and, in epidemics, it is a tool that can facilitate better diagnoses and treatments, which can help reduce the damage caused by the disease.
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