Woman dies after tyre explosion (USAF Captain)

BBC ^ | Apr 2, 2010 | Unknown

[decimon]

A US air force officer who was on holiday in Scotland has died after a car tyre she was holding exploded.

Capt Jenna Wilcox, 27, was on a break with her husband when the accident happened in Dalkeith, Midlothian, on Saturday.

She died at the Western General Hospital in Edinburgh on Thursday, five days after she sustained the injuries.

Capt Wilcox was holding the car tyre inside the vehicle, because it would not fit in the boot, when it exploded.

It is thought the couple had changed the tyre on the BMW Z3, after noticing a bulge in it, but that Capt Wilcox was holding it because the boot was full of luggage.

It is not known what caused the tyre to blow up.

[the long march]

some things are funny, some things are bad taste, some just shouldn’t be said...

[the long march]

Sorry you just don’t seem to understand what a really good hospital ssytem looks like. Hell even the Canadian Minister from Nova Scotia came to the US for his heart stent surgery because the US provided better care.

Innovation, consistency of care, nursing staff, physician capability, and the ability to do what is needed ( as opposed to what is approved) make all the difference

[the scotsman]

I have, as a non-socialist, no problem with criticism of the NHS, although some of it from America verges on the silly and bizarre.

What I DO object to is the characterisation of Scottish and British healthcare and hospitals as backward. Many reading your post have never and will never visit Britain, let alone be in a NHS hospital or seek British healthcare. So you have a responsibility to make fair but uncrude characterisations.

As for your points, British doctors and nurses still have fine worldwide reputation, and Britain has in fact been at the forefront of medical advances and innovation since the NHS came to be in 1948.

[the scotsman]

1948-1970:

HIP REPLACEMENTS,
HOSPICES,
BETA BLOCKERS,
BIRTH CONTROL PILL
PORTABLE DEFIBRILLATOR
DISCOVERY OF NEUROPLASTICITY
DISPOSABLE HYPODERMIC SYRINGE

1971-1999:

CT SCANS
the MRI machine
DNA SEQUENCING

21st C:

Stem cell research
Heart cells grown from stem cells
Discovering the master switch for cancer
The Cancer Genome project

[the scotsman]

http://britsattheirbest.com/ingenious/ii_20th_century_1950_1970.htm

http://britsattheirbest.com/ingenious/ii_20th_century_1971_1999.htm

http://britsattheirbest.com/ingenious/ii_21st_century.htm

http://britsattheirbest.com/

[tupac]

Nobody seems to understand anything but you, how odd. Oops, looks like your ass was just handed to you by a scotsman. I withdraw my demand. Oh wait, on second thought, I demand that you apologize. Then, I’ll withdraw my demand. Go ahead, apopogize.

[the long march]

Name something that rivals oh liver or heart or kidney transplants. Something on the order of MRI and CT machines. Laser and endoscopic devices.

I have been to the UK plenty have friends and family who live there. Will take US hospitals ANY day of the week

[the long march]

You list all these things which were first developed in the US ( and I know because some of them my dad did and some of em I worked on). To claim them as UK inventions or firsts is rather Soviet of you

[the long march]

Blah blah blah. Have a nice Monday

[BluH2o]

In the army they once had me changing truck tires. The kind with the steel ring.

Most large trucking companies with repair facilities at their terminals put a great deal of emphasis on safety in the shop. Many serious injuries, some fatal, have occurred as a result of steel rings not being seated properly and popping out with lethal force when the tire in inflated.

[the scotsman]

Oh please, all are American inventions?. Rubbish.

The man who invented beta blockers, Sir James Black, was a Scot, and developed them in his lab at Glasgow Uni (my old alma mater btw). Thats Glasgow, Scotland, not America. And more research in London. Thats London, England. And he has just died, I posted his death on FR myself.

The man who gave us the hip replacement did so in England in 1950. The American ‘invention’ was in fact a metal hip fifty years earlier, and even then a German had beaten the American by 49 years.

The man who gave us the CT scanner did so in England in 1967, FOUR YEARS before any American built one.

Defibrillator?. An Irishman (Northern Ireland) who invented his item in Belfast in 1957.

I WILL grant you the MRI, as it was partly invented by an American, although Sir Peter Mansfield also received a Nobel Prize for its invention. And it was Aberdeen Univ. that developed the first full body MRI. AND I incorrectly gave Herschel Smith (the pill) as British, when he was a US scientist who made his breakthrough research in Britain.

[the scotsman]

MRI-—part British
CT-—a British invention

The first heart transplant, as everyone knows, was by Christiaan Barnard, a South African, in South Africa in 1967. Barnard is a household name here, clearly not in the US.

[the scotsman]

To clarify an error of mine I have just spotted, the 1950 British hip invention was the modern version, and the US metal hip ‘invention’ was in 1940, not 1900 as I suggested. The German invention of a metal hip was 1891.

[the long march]

I NEVER said that all inventions were done in the US.

Hipe replacements??? The earliest recorded attempts at hip replacement (Gluck T, 1891), which were carried out in Germany, used ivory to replace the femoral head (the ball on the femur).[3]

“In 1940 at Johns Hopkins hospital, Dr.Austin T. Moore (1899-1963), an American surgeon, reported and performed the first metallic hip replacement surgery. The original prosthesis he designed was a proximal femoral replacement, with a large fixed head, made of the Cobalt-Chrome alloy Vitallium. It was about a foot in length and it bolted to the resected end of the femoral shaft (hemiarthroplasty). This was unlike later (and current) hip replacement prostheses which are inserted within the medullary canal of the femur. A later version of Dr. Moore’s prosthesis, the so-called Austin Moore, introduced in 1952 is still in use today.”

CT scanners ( and by the way CT refers to a method of analysis the first idea for which was done in the early 1900s by an Italian):
“The first commercially viable CT scanner was invented by Sir Godfrey Hounsfield in Hayes, United Kingdom at EMI Central Research Laboratories using X-rays. Hounsfield conceived his idea in 1967,[6] and it was publicly announced in 1972. Allan McLeod Cormack of Tufts University in Massachusetts independently invented a similar process, and both Hounsfield and Cormack shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Medicine.[7]” ( NB that these are considental discoveries i.e. not delayed by time or effort)

Defib??:
“Defibrillation was first demonstrated in 1899 by Prevost and Batelli, two physiologists from University of Geneva, Switzerland. They discovered that small electric shocks could induce ventricular fibrillation in dogs, and that larger charges would reverse the condition.

The first use on a human was in 1947 by Claude Beck,[1] professor of surgery at Case Western Reserve University. Beck’s theory was that ventricular fibrillation often occurred in hearts which were fundamentally healthy, in his terms “Hearts are too good to die”, and that there must be a way of saving them. Beck first used the technique successfully on a 14 year old boy who was being operated on for a congenital chest defect. The boy’s chest was surgically opened, and manual cardiac massage was undertaken for 45 minutes until the arrival of the defibrillator. Beck used internal paddles on either side of the heart, along with procainamide, an antiarrhythmic drug, and achieved return of normal sinus rhythm.”

As to Pantridge who gave us the first portable defib device look at his education:
“After his liberation he worked as a lecturer in the pathology department at Queen’s University, and then won a scholarship to the University of Michigan, where he studied under Dr. F.N. Wilson, a cardiologist and authority on electrocardiography.”

So go do some research before you hurt yourself further

[the scotsman]

Thanks, I have. And already admitted any errors.

I pointed out that hip replacement referred to in my earlier post was the modern variety.

CT Scanner?. Hounsfield had already built a rudimentary machine in 1967 at the time of his research. McCormack didnt build one until 1971.

Defibrilliation?. Perhaps whilst I ‘go away and research’, you should go away and learn to read. I said portable defibrillator. Which Pantridge invented in Belfast in 1957.
As for his background, I am aware of it, but so what?. His time in the US hardly is grounds for any American claim on the invention. A look at his background shows that his work on the machine, at least in theory, started in 1945 when he was a lecturer in Belfast. BEFORE he went to America.

BTW, if werent saying all were US, quite what was the point of your ‘Soviet’ post?.

The bottom line is that you originally claimed Britain in recent history hadnt and hasnt been at the forefront of medical invention, research and breakthroughs. I have proved that Britain, since WW2, has been at that forefront.

America undoubtedly has been THE leader in the field in the last 50-60 years since ww2. But guess who has been no 2?.

We have every right to be proud of what we have given the world in that field in the time we are talking about. Britain has given the world some of its greatest recent inventions, breakthroughs and discoveries.

End of.

[Screaming_Gerbil]

Her blog is here:

http://jennawilcox.blogspot.com/

She has some interesting comments in her blog posts:

If you were to look at a picture of a soldier during WWII and a soldier in either Iraq or Afghanistan today, you would notice many differences. Probably the most noticeable different is the amount of gear that today's soldier carries. We are always trying to improve the way we fight and our body armor has saved many lives.

With that said, we shouldn't be wearing body armor in Afghanistan. We shouldn't be driving around in MRAPs either. These are conventional solutions to an unconventional war. We are treating the symptoms rather than the cause.

Let's start with the decision to upgrade from Hummves to MRAPs. The enemy was building bigger and bigger bombs that were capable of catastrophically destroying a Hummve. So now it is mandatory that we use MRAPs. And guess what? Now the enemy can build bigger bombs that will destroy an MRAP. What's after the MRAP? How big are the next generation of vehicles? MRAPs are big enough--they get stuck on unpaved roads, can't fit through the narrow roads, they are high and bulky and are extremely noisy. Whatever adaptions we make to our vehicles, body armor, etc the enemy will still find a way to kill us. Instead of focusing our efforts on protecting ourselves and adapting to the enemy's operations, maybe we should focus more on rooting out the enemy.

In COIN 101, you are taught that the population is the center of gravity. It's no longer a factory or military base. We are trying to win over the population and make them believe in our cause instead of the insurgent's. All of this is being done, of course, in concert with the local government. The local government and its ideals is what the people are fighting for. So we are trying to connect with the population, person to person. You can almost think about it like a politician trying to win an election. He needs to be a gregarious, sympathetic and passionate leader. Now tell me how this politician would do if he is from a different country than the one he is campaigning in. He wears different clothes. He speaks a different language. He has a different culture and a different religion. He can't campaign forever, he has to go home and visit his family. He would have to work ten times as hard as his opponent in order to be successful.

So when we drive around in our big, out of place vehicles, wear our bulky body armor that makes us look like monsters and spend most of our time on eye sore military installations, I think we are helping the insurgents by isolating ourselves from the population. This is our conventional mindset. This is why industrialized nations lose COIN wars. This is why Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires.