Medical Innovations on the Battlefield

0:00Today on State of the World, medical innovations on the battlefield.

0:09You're listening to State of the World from NPR. We bring you the day's most vital international stories up close where they're happening. I'm Greg Dixon. War comes with significant costs, human lives, injury, and misery. But often war also brings rapid technological innovations that have applications beyond the battlefield. Today, we're going to hear a story about how that is true for the war in Gaza. In Israel these days, you might see young men in their 20s walking on the streets with an amputated leg or serious wound from fighting in Gaza. Often Israeli soldiers did not survive those kinds of injuries in past wars.

0:48NPR's Daniel Estrin in Tel Aviv looks at what is saving their lives this time. At an Israeli military base, IDF soldiers present new technology being used to treat wounded soldiers in Gaza. My name is Edo. I'm an officer. I'm a captain in the IDF. This is the Thor UAV. He holds up an Israeli-made drone. It can drop bombs and also parachute units of blood from the sky, factoring in the wind condition to reach wounded soldiers in Gaza. The drone, it reaches above them. It predicts with the wind direction where the parachute is going to go. In past fighting, Israeli combat medics treated wounded soldiers with freeze-dried plasma, But they've now developed technology to get whole blood stored at the right temperature to the battlefield quickly, says an Army biomedical engineer.

1:41The difference between providing freeze-dried plasma and giving whole blood to a severely hemorrhaging victim is incredibly different, and the whole blood saved a lot of life. The soldiers in this story only gave their first name or no name at all. It's part of a new military protocol aimed at protecting them from potential war crimes prosecution around the world for their role in the Gaza War. Here's another Israeli-made device newly deployed in Gaza. This is the breathing circuit. It's a portable device that separates oxygen from the air and uses it to ventilate wounded soldiers without using pressurized oxygen cylinders that aren't as safe on the battlefield.

2:23Dr. Todd Rasmussen at the Mayo Clinic is a leading expert on how armies treat soldier casualties. There is a lot of new innovation. We know that getting blood into patients who have lost blood as fast as possible is good to save life and limb. That was learned during the Second World War. But delivering that blood to medics by drones, that's very new. Today, physicians treating soldiers in Israel and in Ukraine are sharing their experiences with surgeons in the U.S. The strange sort of silver lining of the dark cloud of war is that a lot of these experiences and technologies or methodologies do get translated to the care of civilians.

3:04His team at the Mayo Clinic has been in touch with a surgeon in an Israeli civilian hospital, Dr. Galit Sivak at Rabin Medical Center. She's been sharing the method she's used to save the limbs of 35 Israeli soldiers in the Gaza War, like one soldier named Nivo. He was badly wounded. Okay, he's a good example. He had a lung injury. His teeth were, you know, he lost his teeth. And his leg was, it was really badly mangled extremity. She says she ditched the usual protocol of damage control. It's written in the books that leave the leg alone. And when his lungs are better, then you can deal with the leg.

3:45But the leg is not going to wait for you. It's not going to wait. Dr. Sivak managed to save the leg. She also treated badly wounded Palestinians detained by the Israeli military on suspicion of being militants. But since the war began, Israeli hospitals no longer treat Palestinian civilians wounded in Gaza. The health care system in Gaza has been devastated by Israeli attacks. The UN says Gaza has the highest number of child amputees per capita in the world. We traveled to a kibbutz near the Gaza border to meet Nivo, the 25-year-old Israeli soldier whose leg was saved by Dr. Sivak. Big sections of his leg muscles are missing, left behind in Gaza from the blast that injured him.

4:31But he can do his CrossFit training. He can ride a bike. After we met him, he left for travels in Asia. But his mind often drifts to that moment in Gaza when Palestinian militants detonated explosives in a home, wounding him and killing two close friends in his army unit. He often thinks, could the unit have acted differently so they'd be alive today? Always in your mind. You always think about them. We think about what we did wrong, what we did right, and we learn from it. But I cannot go back. More Israeli soldiers' lives have been saved in this war thanks to medical advances and lessons learned on the operating table.

5:14But those soldiers will carry scars, some invisible, for the rest of their lives. Daniel Estrin, NPR News, Tel Aviv.

5:31That's the State of the World from NPR. Thanks for listening.