military casualties - harvard study

The embargo on this just expired ... from the Harvard School of Public Health. The full text of the article is here.
There is a VERY GRAPHIC photo essay here.

Dear Correspondent,

This is to alert you to an article that will appear in the New England Journal of Medicine's Dec. 9 issue (online Dec. 8) with major military policy implications:

"Casualties of War -- Military Care for the Wounded from Iraq and Afghanistan"

The author is Dr. Atul Gawande, surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and Assistant Professor of Health Policy and Management at Harvard School of Public Health. The article is also accompanied by photographs of survivors' severe injuries.

The article makes these main points:

• Medical personnel have been able to reduce the lethality of war injuries to the lowest percentage ever-- in WW II 30 percent of Americans injured in combat died; in Vietnam, 24 percent. In Iraq and Afghanistan, it is just 10 percent.
  
• The article describes the triage system that has led to this astonishing improvement
  
• There is a shortage of medical personnel to carry out the triage (only 120 general surgeons on active duty, many on second deployment)
  
• The masking of the true human cost, intensity and scope of the war by the success in treating injuries (as of Nov. 9, 2004, 10,153 service members have suffered war injuries)
  
• The preponderance of blast injuries producing an unprecedented burden of patients with mangled extremities
  
• The epidemic of a multi-drug resistant bacterial infection in military hospitals
  
• Selective Service has updated a plan to allow rapid registration of 3.4 million health care workers 18 to 44 years of age
  

*Update: On a related note, via Citizen Frank comes this female Army sergeant's story of being hit by an IED (improvised explosive device). She made it; her driver didn't.