The September Popular Science feature "Shock to the System" (on newsstands next week), discusses the hidden danger of brain trauma faced by soldiers exposed to bomb blasts. The article reveals that one in five American soldiers serving in Iraq may be suffering from a brain injury—not from direct contact with explosions, but from the effects of bomb blast waves that can cause life-threatening damage at the cellular level, even from distances previously considered safe.
I am glad that the military is taking this seriously, and trying to find ways to detect and treat injured soldiers. My husband was injured in 2005, while working as a police bomb tech, and it has been a grueling ongoing battle to get the appropriate diagnosis and treatment from the civilian medical community. Because converging, reflected blast waves can have much higher spot pressures, there are still weaknesses in the theory of the mood ring patches, but at least this is a start. www.wulffden.com/dan
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