Slashdot Mirror
Zombie Pigs First, Hibernating Soldiers Next
ColdWetDog writes "Wired is running a story on DARPA's effort to stave off battlefield casualties by turning injured soldiers into zombies by injecting them with a cocktail of one chemical or another (details to be announced). From the article, 'Dr. Fossum predicts that each soldier will carry a syringe into combat zones or remote areas, and medic teams will be equipped with several. A single injection will minimize metabolic needs, de-animating injured troops by shutting down brain and heart function. Once treatment can be carried out, they'll be "re-animated" and — hopefully — as good as new.' If it doesn't pan out we can at least get zombie bacon and spam."
One of the biggies in this war is Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) - surviving explosions, surviving shots to the helmet - I wonder if we'll be swapping out a lot of dead soldiers for ones suffering extreme brain injury.
Cooling the brain has been known for years to work miracles on minimizing head trauma and taming neurological conditions.
There's no reason for soldiers who've received head injuries to not wear a cooling helmet for a few days after the trauma.
Someone even took the idea and integrated chemical icepacks into motorcycle helmets so that the brain immediately starts getting cooled upon impact.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Really, this is how I see medicine in the future. If you suffer serious trauma, the paramedics will simply kill you at the scene and take your corpse to a hospital where the doctors will patch you up and resurrect you several hours later. If your hand gets mangled, they will simply hack it off, slather on some stem cells, and you'll over a few months, you'll just grow a new one.
Couldn't this be tweaked and used as a method of hibernation to stave off boredom and conserve supplies for long duration space flight?
-
Well, its not as clear cut as that. Current research (a google search away!) tells us that while its probable that inducing hypothermia in the the brain reduces neurological damage, we currently get somewhat contradicting studies suggesting otherwise. In the best case, it may turn out that cooling the brain is an extremely delicate task that must be carefully controlled. Given the level of precision apparently needed, it seems unlikely that simply plopping on a cooled helmet is the best way to go about reducing brain trauma.
In any case, reducing circulation increases the chance of infection (important if there was actual head trauma in addition to brain trauma), and appears to raise the risk of blood clots and heart attacks.
Doesn't mean its useless though. Just that like so many other medical ideas, its complicated. And just cause some company makes a product based on it, doesn't mean it works just like they say it does.
In the field of EMS, we're (in NYS at least) by protocol asked to hyper-oxygenate patients with suspected brain injury in trauma patients that meet a certain set of criteria. The reason for this is to cause vasoconstriction within the brain, reducing blood flow due to vascular resistance and, in theory, slow internal bleeding. As far as I know, the literature on this is uncertain as to its efficacy, but the theory behind it is sound.
Brain tissue can survive for quite a while in a state of hypoxia, compared to other tissues. What is most dangerous in a hemorrhage in the brain is compression of the tissue, as well as direct exposure to blood, both of which can cause necrosis. In fact, when the brain "detects" an injury, its usual response is to increase blood pressure, which is going to accelerate any hemorrhage and make the problem worse. Decreasing heart rate and blood pressure would be an advantage until surgical services are available to drain the blood and close off the source of bleeding.
No sig now