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."

Comments

Quote from TFA

[lecithin]

"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.

Re:Quote from TFA

[Nikkos]

So completely incorrect you should be modded down.

there are no hollowed out sections section on the xm193 bullet. It is a .22 caliber fmj bullet that does not tumble, alter trajectories, or mystically wound the enemy using voodoo. They expand minimally if at all.

The bullets used in wars governed by the Geneva Convention are less lethal than the bullets used by hunters (soft-lead nosed bullets that mushroom)

2.5 year old article?

[drewbradford]

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.

Re:2.5 year old article?

[PoitNarf]

I knew this looked familiar: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/2 8/1834222&tid=191&tid=14

and what about us vegitarians?

[maryjanecapri]

do they have a tofu shrimp bandage we can use?

Tough Choice

[tribentwrks]

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.

You're completely wrong (lots of bullet info)

[Ryvar]

I don't even know where to begin here, let's go line by line:

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 .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.

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

I hate propaganda

[DragonHawk]

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.