Data compiled by the US Senate, and included in the 2005 defense appropriations bill in support of a request for increased funding for the care of amputees at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, reveal that 6 percent of those wounded in Iraq have required amputations, compared with a rate of 3 percent for past wars.A War Amputees blog post (source), also mentions that 6% of Iraq-Afghanistan wounded are amputees.
Of the approximately 175,000 wounds to the extremities received among Federal troops, about 30,000 led to amputation; roughly the same proportion occurred in the Confederacy.*No disregard intended towards Confederate casualties—blue or gray, everyone bleeds red—but Union records were more accurate.
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Contrary to popular myth, most amputees did not experience the surgery without anesthetic. Ample doses of chloroform were administered beforehand; the screams heard were usually from soldiers just informed that they would lose a limb or who were witness to the plight of other soldiers under the knife.
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While most surgeons were aware of a relationship between cleanliness and low infection rates, they did not know how to sterilize their equipment. Due to a frequent shortage of water, surgeons often went days without washing their hands or instruments, thereby passing germs from one patient to another as he treated them. The resulting vicious infections, commonly known as "surgical fevers," are believed to have been caused largely by Staphylococcus aureus and Streptococcus pyogenes, bacterial cells which generate pus, destroy tissue, and release deadly toxins into the bloodstream. Gangrene, the rotting away of flesh caused by the obstruction of blood flow, was also common after surgery. Despite these fearful odds, nearly 75 percent of the amputees survived.
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Ouch, Eide.
Me-fite digaman actually wrote a great story about this in Wired Magazine, Feb 2005. Read here.
From his article:
The good news is that fewer GIs are dying of their injuries than in any modern conflict. In Vietnam, one out of every three soldiers hurt in combat was shipped home in a body bag. In Iraq, it's one in eight. Credit the use of body armor and a dramatic increase in the speed of the Air Force's evacuation chain - the relays of Black Hawk helicopters and transport jets that ferry the wounded from the front lines to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, where soldiers receive care before being sent on to hospitals like Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC.
The bad news is pain. The injuries suffered by those who survive are more severe than in previous conflicts. High-velocity bullets, rocket-propelled grenades, and so-called improvised explosive devices cause tissue damage that is particularly excruciating. Although Interceptor body armor and Kevlar helmets are highly effective at deflecting AK-47 rounds and RPG shrapnel away from the "kill zones" of the torso and head, soldiers' arms and legs are left unshielded for the sake of mobility. The success of body armor has had the unintended effect of creating a new class of survivable physical trauma. Operation Iraqi Freedom has become a war on the extremities - a litany of exploded muscles, shattered bones, and severed limbs.
While the process of extracting injured troops from combat zones has been streamlined, the methods for relieving their agony during evacuation has lagged. Until recently, the military's approach to pain control hadn't changed much since the days when the battlefield anesthetics of choice were rum, ether, and narcotics. "In the Civil War, the answer was general anesthesia and morphine," says Chester "Trip" Buckenmaier, an acute pain specialist at Walter Reed. "Two hundred years later, we can do things that doctors then would never have dreamed of - but the answer to pain is general anesthesia and morphine. We're still in the Dark Ages."
posted by bukharin at 2:23 PM on April 1, 2006