From The Observer, 7/29/07:
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,2137035,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=networkfront
Amputations bring health crisis to Iraq
Peter Beaumont in Mosul
Sunday July 29, 2007
The Observer
Iraq is facing a hidden healthcare and social crisis over the soaring
number of amputations, largely of lower limbs, necessitated by the
daily explosions and violence gripping the country.
In the north of Iraq, the Red Crescent Society and the director
general for health services in Mosul have told US forces, there is a
requirement for up to 3,000 replacement limbs a year.
If that estimate is applied across the country, it suggests an acute
and looming long-term health challenge that has been largely ignored
by the world.
The revelation of the scale of limb loss suffered by Iraqi civilians
is not entirely surprising, even though it has gone unreported.
Levels of amputations performed by military surgeons on US troops in
Iraq are twice as high as those recorded in previous wars:
the most recently available figures suggest 6 per cent of wounded US
troops require an amputation, compared with 3 per cent in other
conflicts.
The problem is the nature of the war itself, which has involved a very
high incidence of blast injuries from car bombs and suicide bombers,
as well as collateral injuries caused to civilians by blasts from US
airstrikes, numbers of which have increased fivefold since early 2006.
'Eighty per cent of the injuries that we see here are to the
extremities,' says Lieutenant Colonel Wayne Mosley, an orthopaedic
surgeon at the military hospital in Mosul that treats US soldiers,
Iraqi civilians and members of the Iraqi security forces, and runs a
clinic for recent Iraqi amputees.
'We see a lot of open long bone injuries or vascular injuries that
require amputation. We do a lot of amputations below the knee. It is
difficult to know how many amputees there are in Iraq, but I would say
it is probably the number one operation performed.'
Another issue is that the prostheses that are available are largely
outdated - based on models designed in the 1970s - while injured US
troops returning home have benefited from a recent leap in prosthetics
technology encouraged by the Iraq war itself.
The problem has reached such a scale that the Marla Fund - a charity
named after US aid worker Marla Ruzicka, who was killed in a suicide
bombing in Iraq - is proposing funding a new $500,000 factory in Mosul
to build prosthetics to meet demand.
The disclosure of the existence of a generation of Iraqi war amputees
comes in the middle of yet more violence:
a car bomb exploded in a busy shopping street in predominantly Shia
eastern Baghdad yesterday, killing at least four and wounding 10.
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Harry
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