CDC: Car crash costs huge, accidents preventable

From the Baltimore Sun (blogs):

The annual cost of injuries and productivity losses from crashes involving cars, motorcycles, bicyclists and pedestrians is now pushing $100 billion, according to a new report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

That amounts to nearly $500 for each U.S. licensed driver in one year, according to the study published in the journal Traffic Injury Prevention.

The breakdown is about $70 billion for car crashes, $12 billion for motorcycles, $10 billion for pedestrians and $5 billion for bicyclists. (Data is from 2005, the most current at study time.)

“Every 10 seconds, someone in the United States is treated in an emergency department for crash-related injuries, and nearly 40,000 people die from these injuries each year,” said Dr. Grant Baldwin, director of CDC’s Division of Unintentional Injury Prevention, in a statement. “This study highlights the magnitude of the problem of crash-related injuries from a cost perspective, and the numbers are staggering.”

AutoPulse Removed from Florida Rescue Vehicles

From EMSResponder:

The Orange County Fire Department took devices that were designed to save lives out of its rescue trucks. The AutoPulse device is supposed to help medics give patients CPR, but firefighters are afraid it could be a liability.

Orange County Fire Rescue spent $600,000 on 55 of the automated CPR devices called AutoPulse to improve efficiency four years ago. The Massachusetts-based manufacturer, Zoll, says they are more reliable than manual CPR, but the fire chief just signed a memo ordering his staff to remove the devices from rescue vehicles.

“We didn’t want to use a piece of equipment that really needed some adjustments,” said Lt. Mark Smothers, Orange County Fire Rescue.

Serious problems popped up earlier this year. An internal review over an 18-month period found the battery failed 30 percent of the time while being used on trauma patients who stopped breathing. They were used on 400 patients since 2009.

Simulated disaster fills Noble Hospital with dying mannequins

Ed. Loved the headline…

From the Anniston Star:

Inside the emergency room, the lights go dark and voices shriek as the beeping of computers that monitor patient breathing, heartbeats and sugar levels fall ominously silent.

Outside the hospital doors, emergency responders in hazmat suits hose off the peeling skin and bloody wounds of screaming victims suffering from chemical burns.

And in a conference room, public information officers, financial and medical leaders talk on phones and send e-mails from laptops, setting up conferences to mitigate a growing sense of panic within and outside hospital walls.

All of these scenes are, of course, practice exercises at the Noble Training Hospital in Fort McClellan, but to those who participate in them – and the media personnel watching Wednesday afternoon – it feels like real life.

Doctors remove world’s largest tumour from patient’s womb

Complete with photo, from the HeraldSun.com.au (via The Daily Mail):

DOCTORS in Argentina have removed what they think is the world’s largest malignant tumour from the body of a 54-year-old woman.

Weighing a shocking 23kg, the tumour had been growing inside the woman’s womb for a year-and-a-half and took four hours to remove, The Daily Mail reported.

Oscar Lopez, surgical coordinator at Gandulfo hospital in Lomas de Zamora, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, said: “I’ve never seen anything like it in my 34 years of medical service.

“We removed a tumour whose weight is comparable to that of a four-year-old child.

“In layman’s terms, it was as if this woman had been pregnant with quintuplets.”

The woman had entered the operating theatre weighing 140kg and returned home 35kg lighter. She is said to be recovering well.