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.
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
Will the only doctor qualified to use these be Doctor Zoidberg?
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.
do they have a tofu shrimp bandage we can use?
nature loves variety::society hates it get your variety at http://www.monkeypantz.net
Sounds a little fishy to me.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
As someone who has been on blood thinners (due to a blood clot in my leg) for the past two years, exessive bleeding is always danger if I get cut. Bandages like these could literally be a lifesaver. I hope they make it to civilian applications soon.
Do I die a slow, fearful death from blood loss, or a slow bloated death from shellfish allergies. I'll be heading to Walgreens to get one of those cheap "I'm allergic to ..." medical tags just in case they start using them in Ambulances any time soon.
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/
"Well, they won't have the cow, they'll treat it nicely."
Doubtful.
http://www.petakillsanimals.com/news.cfm
"I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years." -- Warren Zevon
The company freely admits that the bandage is composed of a very ubiquitous shrimp-derived compound and vinegar. So why $100 a bandage? Either because:
1 - Their product is difficult to manufacture
2 - They give money back to the Wild Shrimp Rights Society
3 - They have a patent
4 - Their customer is the military, and they don't care paying up the wazoo for that sort of thing, because their money is free (i.e. yours, the taxpayer's)
Two of these four possibilities seem correct to me...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I'm here today to speak out in favor of shrimp bandages.
What do people have against shrimp? Is it because they're small? Should we also deny bandages to children? They're small, too.
We have bandages for people, bandages for dogs and bandages for horses, but some people think we should discriminate against shrimp. It's unfair, and I am outraged!
-Emily Litella
PETA doesn't care about the animals, they care about the political power. They use people who care about animals to achieve their own goals. Open your eyes.
Anyway, like I was sayin', shrimp is the fruit of the sea. You can barbecue it, boil it, broil it, bake it, sautee it. Dey's uh, shrimp-kabobs, shrimp creole, shrimp gumbo. Pan fried, deep fried, stir-fried. There's pineapple shrimp, lemon shrimp, coconut shrimp, pepper shrimp, shrimp soup, shrimp stew, shrimp salad, shrimp and potatoes, shrimp burger, shrimp sandwich. That- that's about it.
No, Bubba, now there's Shrimp Band-Aids.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
I wonder how this will affect those allergic to seafood or shellfish? I know a few people that that are deathly allergic to shrimp, would the military one be able to use this on those that have been screened? Could it cause more harm that good? The technology sounds very interesting though.
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?
Read the articles. PETA "euthanized" healthy animals enroute from the vet's clinic, before heading back to PETA. Adoption placement there is about 14%. The SPCA's placement rate in the same area is 66-73% (depending on which SPCA location you compare). Now we know why.
"The PETA employees were caught allegedly dumping the carcasses on Wednesday, June 15, after other dead animals -- enclosed in plastic bags -- were found dumped in the same spot on at least three preceding Wednesdays."
"I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years." -- Warren Zevon
My wife is deathly allergic to shellfish... even a drop of oil flicked off a lobster claw cracking open across the table will give her huge hives if it hits her skin.
Obviously she wears a Medical Alert bracelet for this... what are the effects of this bandage on allergies? Since it goes directly on a wound/into the blood, I'd assume it could be near-instantly fatal to some.
mindslip
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).
Since the article is recycled, allow me to recycle my post from the last time this exact same subject was discussed on slashdot.
Read about some of the reasons why meds are so expensive [yarchive.net].
Apologies for the length of this quote from the above link, but I think it's worth reading (Steve Harris MD on medical costs and litigation):
"...You [Steve's correspondent] were complaining about the cost of American medical care not long ago. You are clueless as to the connection here. Drugs cost more here. Medicine costs more here. A lawyer costs more here. An artitect costs more here. Each of these things has reasons. Until you step away from medicine and see the big picture, you'll never figure it out...
T&K.
Political language
It's understandable to think that it's a crazy price for this. I don't know the specifics of the funding from the government, but usually initial high prices are the result of years of research and development. That R&D has to be paid for some how.
Now, that's not to say that the "government" has never paid stupid amounts of money for things like toilet seats and hammers, but in the case of medicine it's usually justified. Again, I don't know the details but this is usually the case for this sort of thing.
There are similar remedies that until recently were too costly to give to the public, surgical glue based bandages for one. Now you can get them at the grocery store for just a little more than traditional bandages.
This is just like any new technology, like LCD displays. Eventually the R&D will be paid for, and they will be produced in quantities that will become acceptable for the average person to purchase.
-illc0mm
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
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.
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.