Forensic odontologists have come up with an ID chip containing personal identity information which can be placed in a tooth.

Speaking at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences in Seattle, Belgian forensic odontologist Dr Thevissen reported how he and his colleagues had adapted an electronic identification tag which vets injected routinely into animals.

The researchers say that the tooth chip will be useful to forensic scientists trying to identify bodies after major incidents such as natural disasters and terrorist attacks and claim that will also have advantages over a simple identity card.

“You put your ID card in your pocket, we put it in a tooth,” said Dr Thevissen, from the Catholic University of Leuvenin in Belgium. The ID chip can carry information including a person's name, nationality, date of birth, gender and national ID code and can be read after death. The idea came about because of the difficulty and expense of identifying victims of disasters from dental records. Trying to identify bodies after the Asian tsunami, for example, relied heavily on forensic dentists. But it was difficult and time consuming, particularly when teeth had been badly damaged or when dental records were not available. Similar radio frequency identification (RFID) tags are used by retailers to track stock. The tags, the size of a grain of rice, use the power from a radio pulse emitted by an electronic reader to send out a code which can be picked up. This code can be linked to a database containing a person's details or, as Dr Thevissen suggests, spell out simple information directly.