Pentagon Provides Funding for Battle Wound Foam

This article is slightly off topic to what we normal talk about but I think it deserves a post because of the amazing development in technology with regards to reducing injuries and deaths on the battlefields of today.

Saving the Lives of the Brave

Researchers are in mid-development of a new way to reduce the risk and amount of internal bleeding when a soldier is injured during combat, and with funding from the pentagon of £9.6 million, the research can also be progressed. The way it works is that if uve been hit but a bullet during combat, a medic would inject two liquids into your body, near the affected area, and once these mix it will create a polyurethane polymer foam designed to expand and control internal bleeding until you reach a hospital, where the foam can simply be removed in a very short time.

According to the pre-clinical data presented at the 2012 annual meeting of the American Association for the Surgery of Trauma in Kauai, Hawaii, the foam raised survival rates for liver injuries after three hours from 8% to 72%, and reduced blood loss sixfold.

Were Lost Without It 

The problem that currently exists mainly relating to abdominal bleeding is that there isn't nothing that can be done to treat it without proper hospital treatments and surgery, so if a soldier was to suffer internal bleeding, he would not normally be able to be treated until he reached the hospital, so using this foam will increase the survival rates considerably.

Currently for internal bleeding in the abdomen and chest there is nothing that is done pre-hospital to stop the bleeding”

This current technology has gone through basic testing on pigs, but we are hoping that in the months or years to come it will become something of a normality within the forces and maybe in hospitals. Over and Out!