Posted on 07/24/2002 1:50:22 PM PDT by flamefront
Israeli doctors have discovered a gruesome new way to catch hepatitis and possibly other blood-borne diseases - from the flying bone fragments of suicide bombers.
Itzhak Braverman and emergency staff at the Hillel Yaffe Medical Center in Hadera treated 32 victims of one blast. They used CT scans to check for metal fragments in the survivors. In one 31-year-old woman, the scan revealed dense fragments in her neck, breast and groin.
But they were not metal. They were bits of bone from the suicide bomber. On a hunch, Braverman sent a fragment to the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Tel Aviv to be tested.
It came back positive for hepatitis B. Braverman's team say they think this is "the first report of human bone fragments acting as foreign bodies in a blast injury".
Embedded bone
No one had considered this danger before. "As a result of that case, all survivors of these attacks in Israel are now vaccinated for hepatitis B," says Braverman. He thinks embedded bone fragments should routinely be tested for diseases that might spread this way.
In theory, those could include four kinds of hepatitis, dengue fever, syphilis, CJD and possibly malaria.
The biggest fear is HIV. The bone fragment from the woman tested negative, says Braverman. "But these test kits are designed for blood. It is very hard to test bone," he says, especially for a fragile virus like HIV.
Only 50 cases of HIV/AIDS have been reported in the West Bank and Gaza, according to a 2000 report from the Palestinian National Authority Ministry of Health. But the true extent of infection is difficult to assess.
Journal reference: Israel Medical Association Journal (vol 4, p 528)
(Though it's true -- particularly in nations where UsAID has been prevalent or the media has turned a blind eye to the tainted blood scandal -- that infection by AIDS, Hep-C and Hep-B are probably grossly underdiagnosed to date.)
I only hope the casting of Hepatitis (and/or HIV) as a "terrorist" disease as well as a "gay" disease doesn't further obfuscate the real Source of the terror that already has demolished the lives of countless perfectly innocent individuals.
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They are correct in one respect: there are no recent reports in the medical literature of such. There are however many (anecdotal, if not published) reports from Vietnam, Korea and WWII of this phenomenon.
I personally cared for two instances. Both from dynamite accidents. ("Bubba, hold muh beer whist I light the fuse. Hey y'all watch this!")
Hep B?
Clean wars, dirty wars.
Dynamite accidents resulting in bone fragments as shrapnel. Two rednecks were drinking beer and fishing with dynamite. One lit the fuse and held the dynamite too long. It blew up in his hand resulting in a traumatic amputation just below the elbow. Fragments of finger, hand and arm bone were blown into his eyes and chest and his buddy's back and side. I was digging bone fragments and fingernails out of both of them as long as three months later. This happened in the 70's so we had no blood tests for Hep B or C although I wouldn't have been surprised if either were already infected.
Probably too much work for these guys and would have interfered with their beer-drinking.
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