Excerpt
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Tonight, the “NewsHour” begins a new series on invention and innovation called Breakthroughs.
Over the coming months, we will explore the economic and social change invention generates both here and abroad, highlighting the passion of the inventors and the people who benefit from their creations.
The "NewsHour‘s" Cat Wise has our first report, which looks at a new device to stop uncontrolled bleeding on the battlefield and that may one day save the lives of civilians.
A warning: Some of the images may be disturbing to some viewers.
NARRATOR: The fight for terrain is up forward. Back here is the fight to save life.
CAT WISE (NewsHour): Throughout the history of war, from battles long ago to the recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, medics on the front lines have had one main goal, keep the injured alive until they can be safely evacuated to a treatment center.
While those killed in action since the beginning of the Iraq war are almost 90 percent fewer than during the Vietnam War, due in part to better medic training and faster evacuations, one of the biggest challenges medics still face is uncontrolled bleeding. It is the leading cause of preventable battlefield deaths.
And while tourniquets can be applied to certain extremity wounds, some areas of the body, like the armpit and pelvis, are difficult to compress. For those wounds, military medics have had to rely on a very simple tool.
JOHN STEINBAUGH, RevMedx: For centuries, everybody’s used gauze to stop bleeding. Back to the earliest times, you pack material into a wound, and attempt to put pressure on it.
CAT WISE: John Steinbaugh is a former Special Forces medic who served for more than twenty years in the Army. He was on the front lines in Iraq when calls for better equipment started going up the chain of command.
JOHN STEINBAUGH: Back in 2006-2007, at the height of the war, medics were getting fed up with the standard gauze. And we started seeing wounds that were much worse than what we were seeing at the beginning of the war. Medics were having more difficulties stopping the bleeding.
And the way the medics described the device they wanted was fix-a- flat. So if you think of your tire, you inject the fix-a-flat into your tire, it finds the escaping air, it plugs it, and done.
CAT WISE: So, Steinbaugh and a team of experts from the military and private sector got to work. Early ideas like inserting foam or gel into the wounds didn’t sufficiently stop the bleeding, but soon they stumbled on something that did work.
JOHN STEINBAUGH: We literally went to Williams-Sonoma, brought compressed sponges out of a kitchen store, loaded them in homemade syringes that we made, and put them in a model, and they expanded and worked.
No comments:
Post a Comment