Slashdot Mirror
Shrimp Bandages Clot Blood Faster
dwbryson writes "A new bandage technology uses ground up shrimp shells to instantly clot blood when applied to an open wound. These new bandages were developed and are being produced exclusively for the military (at $100 for a 4x4" square), but the company who makes them is hoping to mass market them to general consumers."
"Bleeding is the single largest cause of death on the battlefield," says Jim Hensel, President and CEO of HemCon. Oh... I thought it was bullets or bombs.
Those are indirect causes.
I was all excited to see the headline, thinking that it was finally within our reach, and then I saw that it was the same article (over two years old) that I read long ago.
There are two uses for bandages: one is primary treatment of minor skin wounds, and the other is stabilizing a major wound until real treatment can be given to it. At $100, this is too pricey for a first-aid kit unless you're in a really high-risk situation for major trauma -- the only place outside of the military which strikes me as obvious is a construction site. Its not the sort of thing you can justify putting in the school room first aid kit. There's no real reason to give them to hospitals, since anyone requiring wound healing urgently enough to go to a hospital likely has other problems and has other, more HMO-approved solutions (like regular bandages, which work just fine at preventing you from bleeding to death when administered properly and not overwhelmed by the trauma).
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
The news from the fine 2003 article has been posted here before:
4 4&tid=126
2 8/1834222&tid=191&tid=14
from 2003
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/01/31/20572
from 2004
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/
Yeah, and in Norfolk, VA, PETA euthanizes 85% of animals that come to the shelter, as compared to 27% at the ASPCA shelter. Do the math.
http://www.petakillsanimals.com/petarebuttal.cfm
Do you have ESP?
You're talking about hollowpoint rounds, and there is NOTHING M-16 specific about them. You can buy hollowpoint and non-hollowpoint (typically, "Full Metal Jacket") rounds for almost any type of gun.
http://www.hemcon.com/list_Price.html says they're $113/ea, and a box of 100 is $11,300. Nice discount. And after 2+ years, no less.
Interesting stuff, chitosan. It's a family of oligosaccarides, not a single chemical, and until recently was mostly consider a waste product. Leately though, it's apparently become some sort of fad diet aid as well, one of those alleged 'fat blockers' that are probably total BS. It also used as an emulsifier (an additive which keeps different liquid parts of the food from separating), as a livestock feed. In addition to the clotting action, it supposedly has some anti-bacterial and anti-fungal properties, though how much so isn't said.
While it is mostly derived from seafood shell left from food processing, it can also be extracted from certain fungi, which actually produce it in much larger quantities. This means that it probably will be cheaper in the long run to synthesize it industrially using the fungi rather than harvesting it from shellfish, though unless the market for (or populations of) shrimp and crab suddenly nosedives, they'll probably keep doing that as well (they have to do something with the shells, after all).
By the Rules of Land Warefare bullets such as Hollowpoints are ILLEGAL for use in war.
The US Goverment issues all bullets as FMJ with the exception of special purpose amunition (Tracers, Armor Piercing, etc.)
FMJ Only applies to bullets that have their lead core FULLy enclosed in a METAL shell (JACKET).
There are plenty of other types of bullets that are not hollow points and not FMJ (Lead Wadcutter and semi-wadcutter, Round-nose and Flat-nose half jackets[aka softnoses], lead shot [sub-caliber round balls], etc.)
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
What part?
1: Boiling the live lil tasty fuckers?
2: Us EATING the lil things and peeling the shell off and tossing it into a community bowl?
3: Grinding those shells up for a bandage?
Did you know that when you flash-boil live lobsters, they let out a shriek? Its quite loud.
"The safety of chitosan for individuals with shrimp allergy is a bit questionable. The chitosan comes from shrimp shells and from lots of different suppliers. Some product may be free of allergen, but I cannot vouch for the safety of all chitosan from all suppliers. I would advise all shrimp-allergic individuals to avoid these chitosan bandages.
"Of course, individuals allergic to crab, lobster, and crayfish should also avoid this product because chitosan can be made from wastes of these shells also and because cross-reactions usually occur between shrimp, crab, lobster, and crayfish."
correct.
From the article:
"It's the second most abundant substance on the planet."
I don't even know where to begin here, let's go line by line:
.50 BMG (used by .50cal sniper rifles and machineguns) is really capable of knocking a man over, especially not a charging one. Here is a list of the most common types of modern rifle ammunition and their kinetic energy - I'll leave the math as an exercise to the reader, but none of these would knock a 150lb. man running at 10mph over backwards, or even begin to. Bear in mind that unlike M855 (5.56x45mm) most of the higher-power rounds pass through the target completely without imparting the lion's share of their kinetic energy. Knockdown is due to tissue trauma and pain, if anything, and is rarely a factor when shooting an opponent.
I'm not sure I believe that - the rounds currently deployed to the US Army for their M16s are intended to tear an opponent apart, since an opponent who dies instantly can't continue to fight injured, or worse, charge and set off a bomb.
No, M855 - used by the M16A2 and up (A3, A4), is built to shatter after passing 4" of flesh, and does this quite well provided the weapon firing the round has a 16" barrel. Weapons with shorter barrels have less time over which to induce force upon the projectile thus resulting in a lower muzzle velocity and less fragmentation. This is one of the complaints about the M4 (14") and Colt Commando (11")
Here is an image of what M855 does within a gel block that has the same consistency as muscle tissue:
M855 wound cross-section
They're also built to knock the target off their feet to prevent a charging enemy.
Again this is incorrect. No round short of
M-16 rounds are nasty - they have a hollowed out section on one side so that upon a collision, they drastically change shape. This causes them to travel through the body with an increased angular velocity spinning the way though the targets internals
This is vaguely correct but misleading. The small ring in the side of an M855 bullet that exists where the bullet protrodues from the neck of the cartridge does induce a tumbling motion, but upon yawing 90 degrees within the flesh of the target the bullet typically shatters with at less 50% of the bullet mass fragmenting. There reason for this is not to spin the bullet through the target's internals, but rather to create a larger internal surface area to the wound itself, in order to maximize bleeding. The tissue trauma and kinetic energy doctrines of wound theory are largely ignore by 5.56x45mm largely because of the desire to incapacitate rather than kill targets precisely because each soldier wounded means two people busied (the soldier and a doctor/nurse/rescuer). The bullet that most closely describes what you're saying is the 5.45x39mm round fired in the AK-74, the successor to the AK-47. The Afghans in the 80s referred to them as 'poison bullets' for this reason.
If you've ever seen a target dummy shot with an M-16 round, the hole going in is the size you'd expect it to be - you can fit your hand in the hole on the other side. People who get shot in the arms with an M-16 will lose the arm, go into shock (and thus completely exit the battle) and almost certainly die shortly thereafter.
This is, again, garbage. The large holes are due to fragmentation, not tumbling, and the shock is induced by the maximized blood loss, not straight tissue trauma. I don't know who told you the above but they don't know the first thing about wound theory.
Keep in mind that the United States and European armies are the only military forces that don't use disposable regiments and therefor have large support structures for injured troops. The Chinese army is beginning to move this direction, but historically have no problem with wars of attrition.
That's true enough. Chinese firearms have historically been utter shit.
--Ryvar
Did you know that when you flash-boil live lobsters, they let out a shriek? Its quite loud.
:)
Lobsters have no vocal chords, nor any means of shouting. The sound is produced from expanded gases escaping the joints.
To clarify my position: I am a vegetarian. I don't consider it immoral to eat meat, I do consider it unmerciful to eat meat. That's that.
I hate it when people provide false or misunderstood facts to encourage others to have different moral values. Trying to change the values of others is dubious enough...the last thing you need is to back up your case with ignorance or deception. At best it has no effect, at worst it makes you look like a liar/buffoon.
The http://www.petakillsanimals.com/ site is operated by the self-titled "Center for Consumer Freedom", which, according to their own web site, is "a nonprofit coalition of restaurants, food companies, and consumers" (emphasis mine). See http://www.consumerfreedom.com/about.cfm.
While I think PETA consists mainly of radical nutcases, linking to a corporate mouth-piece in an attempt to discredit them isn't exactly fair and objective, either.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Not only is the litigation off-the-deep-end crazy here, but drugs that are necessary but less profitable than things like Viagra sometimes simply disappear off the market.
Take Eflornithine, the best drug available for treating Sleeping Sickness. Obviously, Sleeping Sickness is not a big problem in the US, where we all have lots of money to buy drugs. It's a problem in Africa, where they don't. So what did Aventis, the manufacturer do? They stopped making it in 1995. It took SIX YEARS for the WHO to manage to talk Aventis into letting someone else manufacture it in 2001.
To recap: a drug company SAT ON A VITAL DRUG for SIX YEARS because they didn't find it "profitable enough," yet wouldn't let anybody else manufacture it to save lives.
The other drugs for treating Sleeping Sickness are nearly as bad as the disease. A huge fraction of the people treated with melarsoprol die when it causes reactive encephalopathy (convulsions, coma, etc...) and those that live often have brain damage.
Of course, the second Aventis discovered (recently) that the drug can be used to remove unwanted facial hair in women (now THERE is a profitable use for a drug!) they cranked right back up into production. Saving lives? Not profitable enough-- we won't make it. Facial hair removal? Crank up the factories!!
It appears since this fiasco that Aventis has cleaned up their act and is donating $5M a year worth of the drug to Doctors Without Borders-- but how many died unnecessarily?
And on the litigation front, I know an EM resident who is being sued by the sons of a patient (all three are lawyers). They are upset because the hospital wanted to move the woman, whose condition was stable, out of the ICU and into long-term hospice care. These assholes are why your medical costs are so high.
Sorry for the rant-- this stuff makes me incredibly angry.
fta:
It's only the shells and you may only be allergic to the meat.
Chitosan can be taken as dietary fibre supplement. With the warning:
I read that as a "cover our ass" warning and it's safe for shellfish allergic people to eat. If it's okay to eat it could be okay to put on severely hemorrhaging woundsMaybe somebody should ask the company (info@hemcon.com) their thoughts before hastily running out to Walgreens.
It also looks like these bandages will be super cheap to make once the patent runs out.
Some searching yields the explination:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chitosan
Basically, the chitosan becomes charged in solution (i.e. the water from your blood), as the protons are ripped off by solutions with a pH of 6.5 or higher (blood has a pH of ~7.4).
Platelets are activated by exposure to injured tissue. In massive bleeding, the plug gets washed out before it can fully form. Chitosan biochemically activates platelets all along its surface (by binding to the gp2b/IIIa receptor, if you care). Also, chitosan becomes extremely sticky when mixed with blood. Another poster mentioned that these bandages must be difficult to get off. This is actually true, particularly with the powdered variant that hardens into a concrete-like mass that has to be surgically removed from the wound bed. The reaction is also exothermic, which leads to the occasional burn.
You are correct that charge has little to do with it. There are many important interactions at the cell surface, however, that are dominated by charge; the cellular environment is in aqueous solution, not a solid, and so is the bandage once it gets bled on.
I'm not sure I believe that - the rounds currently deployed to the US Army for their M16s are intended to tear an opponent apart, since an opponent who dies instantly can't continue to fight injured, or worse, charge and set off a bomb. They're also built to knock the target off their feet to prevent a charging enemy
OK, the rounds used in the average M16 rifle are a 5.56x45mm (.223 calibre) ball. Ball means solid, no magic hollowpoint, no poison, no voodoo, it's an upscaled .22 bullet, you can buy similar ammo at any gun store.
As far as the M16 knocking someone off their feet have you ever heard of a little thing called "Newton's third law of motion" you know, that one that says something like "every action has an equal and opposite reaction". OK, if you fire a bullet at someone that has enough power to knock them off their feet then guess what: you as the shooter will also be knocked off your feet. MV=MV and in all of my years of firing M-16s, (and M-60s and M-2s, and M-85s, M-240s and M68E2s) I never noticed any magic inertialess compensators that eliminated the recoil.
The recoil on the M-16 is pretty minimal compared to that of a rifle firing a heavier cartridge such as the 7.62x51 (.308) or 7.62x63 (30.06). If I spend a few hours at the range blasting away at targets with my .308 Vepr, or my Ruger .44 magnum carbine or my .308 M77 Mark II I'll end up with a bruised shoulder. On the other hand I can fire an M-16 all day long (and have done so) without any damage.
M-16 rounds are nasty - they have a hollowed out section on one side so that upon a collision, they drastically change shape. This causes them to travel through the body with an increased angular velocity spinning the way though the targets internals. If you've ever seen a target dummy shot with an M-16 round, the hole going in is the size you'd expect it to be - you can fit your hand in the hole on the other side. People who get shot in the arms with an M-16 will lose the arm, go into shock (and thus completely exit the battle) and almost certainly die shortly thereafter.
Dude, it's a fucking ball round, despite what you might have read somewhere on the internet the US Army was not able to duplicate any magic bullet technology that might have been used in the Kennedy assassination to produce a wonder bullet. IF they had we probably would have won the Vietnam war. "Wow Sarge, I fired ten rounds through my M16 and killed 300 VC and wounded 250 others!." "Yep, that's the magic bullet technology son, we'll be in Hanoi by Christmas. God bless the magic bullet!". I've blasted plenty of things with standard M16 ammo and haven't noticed any magical spinning mushroom effect. I've met and served with a bunch of Vietnam vets who hated the M16 not because of the early design problems (lack of a forward assist, standard barrel and chamber not chrome plated) but because the round didn't have any stopping power, that whole MV=MV thing again, it doesn't hurt you as much when you fire your M16, guess what, that means it doesn't hurt the enemy as much when it hits him. "Damn you Sir Isaac Newton!". Shotguns and Tommy guns were very highly thought of because someone hit with a shotgun or with a .45 round fired from a short distance generally stops what they're doing (trying to kill you) and focuses on something else (bleeding).
The big advantage of the M16 is that it's a lot lighter than an M14 or an M1, it's shorter, so less likely to get caught on things when you're charging through the brush, and you can carry more ammo for it. Given that a lot of the shooting you do in the military isn't aimed at the other guy as much as it is fired at him to keep his head down (so he can't shoot at you) this is a useful feature.
I suggest you stop watching crap
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
Actually, I've seen the type of ammo your parent is talking about. It's not actually a hollow point, but a FMJ solid steel core with a dimple at the tip. It's technically not in violation of the Geneva convention, which I guess it was specifically designed to circumvent.
Anyway, what happens is that the dimple causes the bullet to tumble upon entry allowing it to transfer maximal kinetic energy to the target mass, causing damage on the same order as an expanding hollow core bullet. It also still has a decent chance of piercing body armor, since the bullet doesn't actually deform upon impact. In short, it's nasty shit.