“The Pentagon this week announced an $11 million grant doled out to three research institutions, all of them long-time hubs for the military’s ongoing PTSD investigations. Experts at Emory University, the University of Southern California and New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center will study the effectiveness of D-Cycloserine (DCS). DCS is a pharmaceutical thought to help extinguish fearful memories.

…Exposure therapy is thought to work by allowing patients to revisit traumas in safe settings. Every time the mind remembers an event, it “rewrites” that recollection. By helping a patient rewrite traumatic memories to be less frightening, studies suggest that exposure therapy can significantly improve symptoms like nightmares and flashbacks.

Adding DCS seems to hasten that process, targeting the precise brain pathways responsible for regulating fear responses.

Researchers will look at two different kinds of exposure therapy: Virtual reality, where a patient is fully immersed in digital combat scenarios, and prolonged imaginal exposure therapy, which asks them to simply remember and recount fearful memories.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/12/fear-erasing-drugs/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29

Scientists have discovered a mechanism underlying the type of brain injury that soldiers often suffer as a result of roadside explosions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The work could point the way toward early treatment for these acute blast injuries by identifying potential drug targets.

Two new papers from the Disease Biophysics Group at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, led by Kevin “Kit” Parker, use tissue-engineering techniques to model the physical and biochemical effects of traumatic brain injury (TBI) in the brain and blood vessels. Parker says the work represents a first step toward a “TBI on a chip” that could be used to screen for drugs to treat blast-injured soldiers before long-term damage sets in.

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Courageous Army medic awarded Military Cross

By Brian Brady, Whitehall Editor
Sunday, 27 March 2011

An Army medic who put herself in “mortal danger” to treat a wounded Afghan soldier under heavy Taliban fire has been awarded the Military Cross, Britain’s third-highest medal for gallantry.

Lance Corporal Kylie Watson, who gave the casualty medical care in exposed open ground for 20 minutes before getting him to a helicopter, is one of more than 130 servicemen and women commended for bravery in the latest military honours list.

The medic, who also made a 100-yard dash through enemy fire to help another Afghan soldier, was praised for her “immense courage [and] willingness to put her own life at risk”.

L/Cpl Watson, of the Royal Army Medical Corps, stemmed the soldier’s bleeding despite being hampered by other Afghan troops, and got the injured man to a helicopter landing site 200 yards away.

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Scientists say Pentagon misleads on dust study.

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon is falsely claiming its research shows that airborne dust in Iraq and Afghanistan poses no health risk to U.S. troops, say three scientists whose review of that research found it riddled with mistakes.

Military officials then falsely said the review of their research backed their conclusion that the dust in the two war zones is no different from that in California, scientists Philip Hopke, Mark Utell and Anthony Wexler say.

RADM Mike Mittelman, MC, SHCE, Command Surgeon for U.S. Joint Forces Command, discusses joint forces military medicine at IDGA’s 12th Battlefield Healthcare event.  He details military medical efforts from a joint U.S. forces and NATO perspective.  He also talks about challenges and priorities faced as command surgeon at USJFCOM.

“Canines differ in anatomy and physiology,” the guidelines say. “Knowledge of key differences will assist the physician in resuscitating and stabilizing … prior to transport to veterinary care.”

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“Behind the scenes, the spread of a pathogen that targets wounded GIs has triggered broad reforms in both combat medical care and the Pentagon’s networks for tracking bacterial threats within the ranks.

Interviews with current and former military physicians, recent articles in medical journals, and internal reports reveal that the Department of Defense has been waging a secret war within the larger mission in Iraq and Afghanistan – a war against antibiotic-resistant pathogens.”

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.02/enemy.html

… Deep in the back of the weekly bulletin of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there is a note that NDM-1, the “Indian supergene,” has been isolated from a patient in a U.S. military field hospital in Bagram, Afghanistan.

It’s been a few months since NDM-1 was in the news, so let’s recap. The acronym (for “New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase 1″) indicates an enzyme that allows common gut bacteria to denature almost all the drugs that can be used against them, leaving two or three that are inefficient or toxic.

… You don’t even have to imagine what comes next, because we already know: Multidrug-resistant Acinetobacter baumanii has been spreading through the military hospital system for almost a decade, with grave consequences for injured military personnel.

Acintobacter slipped by the military medical system before they noticed, and became established in military hospitals before infection-control efforts were prepared to counter it.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/06/ndm1-us-military/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29

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