Got cocktail sauce?"Hold muh beer 'n watch this!" PING....
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Posted on 02/06/2003 11:04:28 AM PST by Willie Green
For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use.
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Shrimp shells and vinegar may become staples for U.S. Army troops in Iraq -- not as rations but in a new bandage that staunches heavy bleeding in minutes.
A team of Portland, Oregon-based scientists searching for a solution to an age-old problem -- how to keep soldiers from bleeding to death on the battlefield -- stumbled on the kitchen pantry combination and, through high-tech wizardry, turned it into a super-sticky, combat-ready field dressing.
"Death from bleeding hasn't changed since the (1898) Spanish-American war," Dr. Kenton Gregory, the Portland cardiologist who led the team, said on Wednesday in a telephone interview.
"Even with armor, people bleed from gunshot or shrapnel wounds because the field medics have the exact same thing in their rucksacks as medics in earlier wars -- gauze dressings."
HemCon Inc., the company Gregory formed with retired Col. Bill Wiesmann, a former director of the Army's Combat Casualty Care unit, has taken orders for 10,000 of the bandages, which won expedited FDA approval last month. The first shipments will go to U.S. soldiers in the Gulf in case of a war there.
About three years ago, the Army asked Gregory and Wiesmann to do what military surgeons have puzzled over since the Trojan War: develop the perfect field dressing.
"It had to be easy to use, light and stable with a long shelf life and had to be able to withstand a lot of temperature variation," Wiesmann said. "And it obviously had to be safe."
And cheap. The Army gave the team a $400,000 grant to develop a prototype.
"It was unreasonable but we gave it a shot," Gregory said.
UNORTHODOX SUBSTANCES
It took about a year of testing different substances -- some unorthodox -- for the team to settle on chitosan, a naturally occurring protein found in shrimp shells.
"One of the guys (researchers), Rui-Qing Qian, remembered something from the 1950s that the component that makes up shrimp shells ... when it comes in contact with red blood cells causes them to clot," Gregory said.
The substance quickly stopped aortic bleeding in pigs but test bandages kept falling apart, Gregory said. Australian scientist Simon McCarthy added vinegar and a chain of about 20 chemical reactions to stabilize the bandage and make it stick tight to wounds so soldiers could be transported from field to hospital without disturbing the clot.
The first tests, done in November at the Army Institute of Surgical Research at Fort Sam Houston, Texas on swine whose livers were lacerated, were a success, Gregory said.
The Army scientists who tested the HemCon bandage praised its simplicity and minimal storage requirements after it saved all but one of eight gravely wounded animals.
Dr. Tony Pusateri, who tested the bandage, described it as "very promising," adding that more testing is needed.
"It's one of the few dressings that we have studied that stopped ... heavy bleeding that kills soldiers on the battlefield," Pusateri said. "It's very promising that this dressing has made it this far."
The HemCon team is under "intense pressure to roll these bandages out pretty soon," Gregory said, adding that he expects the first batch to complete production in the next two weeks.
Gee, what's with the big rush?
Got cocktail sauce?"Hold muh beer 'n watch this!" PING....
If you want on or off this list, please let me know!
The Band-Aid box of the future:
Have you smelled shrimp parts that have been sitting out for two weeks?
Not to mention cocktail sauce and lemon.
Mmmmmmmmm... shrimp... 
Do muslims follow the same rules? What if opne of the ingredients was pig fat? We'd have to let all our prisoners bleed to death.
Darn. What a shame. Oh, well, we can't grieve forever. Pass the ham!
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