US Combat Fatality Rate Lowest Ever

Not sure if this was medical or war forum material.

Found this interesting. I was in the army. The old
joke was to AVOID military hospitals and doctors
because they were considered 'the worst'. Now it
looks like they are really first rate. God bless 'em.

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U.S. Combat Fatality Rate Lowest Ever
Ceci Connolly
Washington Post
12.9.04

EXCERPT -

Ten percent of soldiers injured in Iraq have died from their war wounds, the lowest casualty fatality rate ever, thanks in large part to technological advances and the deployment of surgical SWAT teams at the front lines, an analysis to be published today has found.

But the remarkable lifesaving rate has come at the enormous cost of creating a generation of severely wounded young veterans and a severe shortage of military surgeons, wrote Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.

The war in Iraq has produced the "largest burden of casualties our military medical personnel have had to cope with since the Vietnam War," said Gawande's report in the New England Journal of Medicine. By contrast, 24 percent of soldiers wounded in the Vietnam War or the Persian Gulf War did not survive.

"It used to be our thinking that the number of deaths reflects the violence of the war," Gawande said in an interview. "Now, the number of deaths reflects how well surgical teams are doing in saving lives."

< full story >

It is in part due to the protective vest that alot of them have now. So instead of being killed outright by for example an rpg blast they only lose limbs and their eyesight, the vital organs are protected. The end result is a low fatality rate, but a hospital full of wounded of which most will never see combat again due to their severe injuries.

The other is the advance of trauma medicine over the years. The Army is the biggest researcher into the field of trauma medicine for obvious reasons. The benifts of thier research trickle down into the civilian sector and benifits us all.