BLOOD CLOTTER FLOPPED IN IRAQ, SOLD AT HOME

A new blood-​​clotting agent was tried out by the Marines dur­ing Gulf War II — and flopped. So why is the prod­uct now being rolled out to con­sumers?
Developed by Newington, CT-​​based Z-​​Medica with fund­ing from the Office of Naval Research, “QuickClot” is designed to stop heavy, uncon­trolled bleed­ing. It does this by “absorb­ing all the liq­uid in the blood, and leav­ing behind the clot­ting fac­tors,” accord­ing to a Navy press release. In tests, the pow­der sup­pos­edly helped turn ” wounds that once were 100 per­cent fatal into wounds that were 100 per­cent non­fa­tal.“
On the bat­tle­field, how­ever, QuickClot didn’t hold up as well. Members of the 1 Marine Expeditionary Force, serv­ing in cen­tral Iraq, reported that QuickClot was “inef­fec­tive” in treat­ing wounds, and keep­ing peo­ple alive.
A field report, pre­pared by Marine Corps Systems Command, detailed some of their com­plaints with the agent:

- Wounded Iraqi civil­ian. Shot near brachial artery. QuikClot was applied per the instruc­tions. The sub­stance dried but was flak­ing off. Standard direct pres­sure applied by corps­man proved more effec­tive on the patient.
– Iraqi civil­ian shot in back with punc­tured spine. QuikClot applied to severe bleed­ing. Pressure from bleed­ing sprayed QuikClot away. According to LT Webb, QuikClot was every­where but the wound.
– Iraqi civil­ian, female, shot in femoral artery. She suf­fered severe arte­r­ial bleed­ing. Patient bled out. QuikClot unable to be applied effec­tively due to pres­sure of blood flow from wound. Patient died.
– An LAR Marine was shot in the femoral artery. Quick Clot was applied to the heav­ily bleed­ing wound. The pres­sure from the blood soon caused the QuickClot to be pushed out of the wound and ren­dered inef­fec­tive. A tourni­quet was applied instead. The patient died.

Despite these fail­ures, QuickClot is already being mar­keted to fire­men, emer­gency med­ical tech­ni­cians, cops — even vet­eri­nar­i­ans. In the next few months, the pow­der will be intro­duced to the larger con­sumer mar­ket, for home first aid. According to the Navy, Z-​​Medica is push­ing ahead with tri­als to show that QuickClot could help “the par­tic­u­lar bleed­ing prob­lems of dia­bet­ics, hemo­phil­i­acs, and (blood-​​thinning med­i­cine) coumadin users.“
Now, the Marines’ report does say that other units had dif­fer­ent opin­ions of QuickClot. So maybe it worked bet­ter else­where in Iraq. But with such con­flict­ing data, you’d think that Z-​​Medica would take a pause before ask­ing the pub­lic to trust their lives to QuickClot.
THERE’S MORE: “The folks at Z-​​Medica are well aware of this report,” a spokesper­son says in an e-​​mail. “It was from a par­tic­u­lar unit that either was not ade­quately briefed about how to use QuikClot or did not fol­low instruc­tions prop­erly, though they may have thought they were. The Navy and Marines also have numer­ous con­firmed cases of QuikClot sav­ing lives in the Iraqi the­atre. It does work and is con­tin­u­ing to be included in the new Marine first aid kit.”

June 11th, 2003 | Uncategorized | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.