Lifesaving kits for GIs in short supply

[cal04]

Despite Army order that front-line medics get special clotting bandages, soldiers say they’re still needed

Nine months after an Army order that all combat soldiers would get lifesaving clotting bandages to curb bleeding deaths, some troops in Iraq are still calling home, asking friends and family to supply
them. Despite Army assurances that there are plenty of the bandages to go around, soldiers have written to say they haven't found their way to all of those on the front lines.

And the manufacturer under contract with the Army acknowledged last week that early production problems may have spurred a shortage. One platoon leader stationed in the Sunni Triangle west of Baghdad asked his college alumni association to send the bandages, saying his unit has never had access to them during his two tours there. "We have no supplies of coagulating bandages and agents to stop arterial bleeding," the soldier wrote in an e-mail about a week ago.

"My unit does not have the budget to procure such supplies for our front-line soldiers," wrote the soldier, a second lieutenant who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation. "Bleeding out is the leading cause of death for our soldiers." Another soldier, Spc. Maghen Philbrook of Northport, Maine, said Wednesday, "I didn't have one in September and I didn't have one six weeks ago."

"I never saw them over there," said Philbrook, who returned home in April after serving 15 months in Iraq with the Maine Army National Guard's 152nd Maintenance Co. A Bay Shore woman whose soldier son bled to death in Iraq three years ago has taken up the cause, sending 410 clot-promoting bandage kits to the second lieutenant after hearing of his need for supplies. "If I can prevent one ... knock at the door of a military family, I will do all I can to prevent them from living though the heartbreak I have had to live through," Dorine Kenney said.


http://www.newsday.com/news/local/longisland/ny-liband0608,0,7490813.story?coll=ny-li-bigpix
House panel clears another $50 billion for Iraq
another 50 billion yesterday and they have no kits, this is disgusting

[MercutioATC]

1. Here's one of the bandages being used...interesting low-tech approach.

http://www.sciencentral.com/articles/view.php3?article_id=218391915&cat=2_4

[oscar111]

2. "tax cuts, service cuts" .. that is how i remind myself how to interpret

news like this.

taxcuts for the rich necessitate a result... cuts to the fed budget for essentials like bandages, body armor.

service cuts BTW, come in two forms

1. routine services, ... bridge repair, cop funds, firefighter funds, asylums for the criminally insane funds {thus, after cuts here, we see psychos on the streets.. and making headlines with heinous crimes.. because of GOP cuts in funds to asylums }..

2. help services.. like food stamps and housing for the homeless. Cuts here make the bottom more desperate to work for less and less... pulling down the WAGE LADDER.. which even lowers wages for such as you, dear reader, who have nicely paid white collar office jobs.
=====================================
Thus, taxcuts = wage cuts.
=======================================

Wages are down 4 percent since '80. When you remove the Clinton years and inflation.

Trickledown is a flop. Toss trickledown.

wages are the real economy, not GDP. You can only eat from your own wages, not the GDP. So wages are the REAL economy.

Taxcuts are a main way the GOP destroys the middle class. And, by cutting such as bridge repair and cop funds, they destroy america. Why does the GOP hate america?

[ConcernedCanuk]

3. Umm - "life-saving" ain't exactly a priority of the PNACers

.
.
.

They are more into genocide . . .

and remember,

It can cost the military 100's of thousands of dollars to maintain a wounded soldier's life as permanently disabled

cheaper to let him die

Kapitalism

work's great, don't it?

(sigh)