War Casualties Research Articles

Casualties of Trade Wars

Although trade wars have existed throughout modern history, there is little empirical evidence as to how countries choose which industries to target for retaliatory tariffs. We develop a political economy model of trade policy to explain a country’s choice of product for retaliation and test the implications of this model using the choices of seven countries in two retaliation episodes: (1) the US imposition of steel and aluminum tariffs in 2018 and (2) the US passage of the Continued Dumping and Subsidy Offset Act (CDSOA) in 2000. The empirical results from a binary choice regression indicate that countries are more likely to sanction products with higher trade values and those in which they can extract terms-of-trade welfare, suggesting that trade wars move countries back to a terms-of-trade driven prisoner’s dilemma equilibrium. We find a significant amount of heterogeneity in the degree to which countries consider the political importance of the industry when developing their retaliation list; while countries such as the EU and Canada clearly targeted politically important industries in 2018, we find little evidence that emerging markets did so. There is also little evidence that the EU and Canada targeted politically important industries in retaliation against the CDSOA.

Initial Assessment and Resuscitation of the Battlefield Casualty—an Overview

This review focuses on the recent evolution of the initial resuscitation of combat-injured personnel. It summarizes the recommendations of TCCC and makes recommendations based on literature review and author experience. Over nearly 20 years, the experience in caring for combat casualties in the global war on terror has led to significant changes within military trauma care. Evolution of pre-hospital care, utilization of tourniquets and TXA for hemorrhage control, and use of whole blood as the preferred resuscitative fluid have significantly reduced mortality. Additionally, the collective wisdom of experienced trauma surgeons serves as an invaluable guide for managing setup and flow within the various levels of the military trauma system. This review article highlights recommended practices for the initial resuscitation of personnel injured in combat along with providing proven methods for trauma team preparation and management that can and should be used by any surgeon preparing to deploy.

The identification of British war casualties: The work of the Joint Casualty and Compassionate Centre

The Joint Casualty and Compassionate Centre Commemorations team (JCCC), part of the British Ministry of Defence, is responsible for managing the identification of human remains from British casualties who fell during WWI and WWII primarily. With this task in mind, the work to identify and rebury the historic battle casualties is at the heart of this team’s work. In addition, the team also considers new evidence regarding possible identification of an individual buried as “unknown” and they administer the Protection of Military Remains Act 1986. This paper provides an insight into the work undertaken by this Team, identifying and commemorating the remains of WWI and WWII British casualties. The paper also includes several case studies.

Nikolay Ivanovich Pirogov as an innovator in anatomy, surgery, and anaesthesiology. Part II

This article is the second of two articles on Nikolay Ivanovich Pirogov. In the first article “Highlights of the professional activities of Nikolay Ivanovich Pirogov before and after his professoriate in Saint Petersburg (1841–1860).” we discussed his early training and his professional development at the Dorpat University and abroad till his appointment in Saint Petersburg 1841. Also is discussed how during and after his professoriate in Saint Petersburg he developed management of mass war casualties. In this second article we highlight his professional career as an anatomist, surgeon and anaesthesiologist. The authors want to emphasize that these two articles are an extract from previously published extensive articles related to Nikolay Ivanovich Pirogov. You can find these articles in the reference list under the name of the first author [12–17].

An archetype for evolving dynamics of primitive human culture

From the very beginning, human civilizations have evolved and spread across the surface of the planet Earth through various dynamical processes such as growth, assimilation, invasion, aggression, and annihilation. Such processes being responsible for expansion, integration, destruction, and reconstruction of civilizations, used to play key roles in the tides of time and fabric today’s multicultural societies. A culture, being an inherent entity of human civilization, also evolves in conformity with civilizations. As such, the evolution of cultures can be understood as an artifact of such dynamical processes. How such dynamical processes initiate the diversification of cultures from small-scale simple societies? Why most of the cultures go extinct and why some survive for a comparatively longer period even after facing several wars and attacks? What plays a key role in creating a multicultural society? In order to partially answer all such highly stimulating questions, here we are interested in tackling the problem by giving importance to the nature of governing dynamical processes. Hence we perform a set of computer simulations on an archetypal model where a large number of independent and isolated primitive human cultures, being distributed randomly in a two-dimensional domain, are allowed to evolve following some historically-inspired rules for expansion, interaction, and merging processes among the cultures. As they evolve through inter-cultural interactions, the surviving cultures dynamically inherit the characteristics of their ancestors, leading to a well-mixed globally-polarise culture that emerges depending on the frequency and casualties of wars, consequences of coalescence, and similarity factors. From the ensuing simulation results, we find in accord with the historical fact that the rich diversity in a surviving culture is a consequence of all the dynamical processes that act repeatedly during its entire evolutionary track. We also visualize through our model how a global monocultural state and colonization among multicultural societies emerge separately in the modern period. We highlight a number of possible avenues for future research along these lines.

Life and Limb: New Estimates of Casualty Aversion in the United States

Abstract Dramatic improvements in US military medicine have produced an equally dramatic shift in the kinds of battle casualties the US military has sustained in its most recent wars. Specifically, there has been a notable increase in the ratio of nonfatal to fatal casualties. Most studies of casualty aversion in the United States, however, have focused on fatal casualties. Using a series of survey experiments, I investigate whether respondents are equally sensitive to fatal and nonfatal casualties, differences between populations with and without close military ties, and whether views on casualties are conditioned by respondents’ level of knowledge about casualties or the individual costs of war they expect to incur. I find that, while the general public is generally insensitive to different types of casualties, respondents with close ties to the military are better able to distinguish among kinds of casualties. This advantage, however, is not due to respondents with close military ties being better informed about war casualties. Instead, those who bear the costs of war directly appear better able to distinguish among those costs.

The fillip of the World Wide Web: Rewriting and expanding history

ABSTRACT Background This issue addressed here is the discovery, via the World Wide Web, of a 1917 newspaper article in Newfoundland linking an Australian First World War nursing sister with one of Newfoundland’s war casualties. Aim The aim is to demonstrate that a century after the fact, new technologies can bring together historical sources that expand our knowledge of past events. Method The primary and secondary historical sources of the circumstances of a Newfoundland soldier meeting an Australian nursing sister at the First World War were examined and the various media that coalesced to allow greater access to newspaper archives were canvassed. Findings The letters of Australian nursing sister Elizabeth McMillan survive and recount how she distributed Christmas cheer to her patients in 1915 on Lemnos. The Newfoundland article relates how Private Coultas’ Christmas gift of a New Testament survived in his effects after he was killed but it is also provides an example of the vagaries of newspaper reporting. Electronic technologies developed through the twentieth century allowed the linkage of these distant sources. Discussion The World Wide Web has hugely changed access to electronic newspaper archives. This medium has allowed a glimpse into both sides of an episode of nursing care, something notoriously difficult to research, over a century after the event. Conclusion The example discussed here illustrates how the development of the World Wide Web provides new opportunities to access disparate historical sources. New appreciations of the dynamics of past events are possible but the critical human element is still essential for interpretation.

Damage-Associated Molecular Patterns and Their Signaling Pathways in Primary Blast Lung Injury: New Research Progress and Future Directions.

Primary blast lung injury (PBLI) is a common cause of casualties in wars, terrorist attacks, and explosions. It can exist in the absence of any other outward signs of trauma, and further develop into acute lung injury (ALI) or a more severe acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). The pathogenesis of PBLI at the cellular and molecular level has not been clear. Damage-associated molecular pattern (DAMP) is a general term for endogenous danger signals released by the body after injury, including intracellular protein molecules (HMGB1, histones, s100s, heat shock proteins, eCIRP, etc.), secretory protein factors (IL-1β, IL-6, IL-10, TNF-α, VEGF, complements, etc.), purines and pyrimidines and their derived degradation products (nucleic acids, ATP, ADP, UDPG, uric acid, etc.), and extracellular matrix components (hyaluronic acid, fibronectin, heparin sulfate, biglycan, etc.). DAMPs can be detected by multiple receptors including pattern recognition receptors (PRRs). The study of DAMPs and their related signaling pathways, such as the mtDNA-triggered cGAS-YAP pathway, contributes to revealing the molecular mechanism of PBLI, and provides new therapeutic targets for controlling inflammatory diseases and alleviating their symptoms. In this review, we focus on the recent progress of research on DAMPs and their signaling pathways, as well as the potential therapeutic targets and future research directions in PBLI.

Syrian Civil War: a systematic review of trauma casualty epidemiology

BackgroundThe Syrian Civil War has caused over 400 000 traumatic deaths. Understanding the nature of war casualties is crucial to deliver healthcare improvement. Historic regional conflicts and Syrian mortality data...

Trade War, PPE, and Race

Tariffs on Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), such as face masks and gloves, weaken the American response to COVID. The United States has exacerbated PPE shortages with Section 301 tariffs on these goods, part of a trade war with China. This has a disparate impact felt by minority communities because of a series of health inequity harms. COVID’s racial disparity appears in virus exposure, virus susceptibility, and COVID treatments. This essay makes legal, policy, and race-and-health arguments. Congress has delegated to the U.S. Trade Representative expansive authority to increase tariffs. This has made PPE supplies casualties of the trade war. In political terms, the Trump administration has prioritized increasing tariffs over public health readiness. Regarding race, PPE shortages exemplify the socio-economic effects of trade policies and add to COVID’s racial disparities.

Hydrology, rheumatology, and rehabilitation: the campaigning of Fortescue Fox.

Soon after qualification, Fortescue Fox (1858-1940) began practice in a Scottish spa where he acquired a lifelong interest in chronic disorders, especially arthritis. He worked to improve the status of spa medicine, recasting it as medical hydrology. At the start of the First World War, his interests turned to the handling of war casualties and a seminal work on physical treatment and rehabilitation was published in 1916. He set up a physical treatment clinic for damaged soldiers and co-founded a residential community where such treatment could be coupled with paid work in rural crafts. After the war Fox was a founder and president of the International League against Rheumatism and helped establish a groundbreaking outpatient clinic from which academic rheumatology in the UK developed. Yet he is not seen as a founding father of British rheumatology, having been on the losing side of an argument about the focus of the specialty. In medical rehabilitation he does have that honour.

The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Biotech Industry.

The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Biotech Industry.

Ballistic Performance Evaluation of Aluminium Plate Impact by Fragment Simulating Projectile

The ballistic performance has drawn attention to researchers from a military background. They intend to provide solutions to ensure the soldiers in the front line of war do not kill in action. A casualty in war can lead to depression among soldiers and not to mention to their family as well. The aim of this work is to provide preliminary data for the ballistic limit velocity, VBL of the hydrodynamic ram study. The test was conducted at Science and Technology Research Institute (STRIDE), Batu Arang, Selangor which is under the Ministry of Defence (MINDEF) Malaysia. The gas gun and fragment simulating projectiles (FSP) were employed in this test. There were about 16 rounds of fire were shot with different velocities from 246 up to 373 m/s. The ballistic limit velocity was calculated by taking the average of an equal number of highest partial perforation and the lowest perforation velocities. It was found that the VBL was equal to 275.8 m/s. On top of that, there were two main failure modes observed i.e. partial penetration and complete penetration.

Bayes factor: A useful tool to quantitatively evaluate and compare performance of multiple stature estimation equations

When stature estimation of incomplete skeletal remains is necessary, researchers select an estimation equation which will produce the most accurate estimates. The purpose of this study is to propose that, given prior information of a target sample, the Bayes factor can be a useful tool to quantitatively evaluate and compare performance of multiple equations in this regard. This study also explores the best-performing equations to reconstruct statures of Korean War casualties with a demonstration of equation comparisons by the Bayes factor.Thirty-three sets of stature estimates were generated using different equations based on the osteometric data of the Korean War casualties. The distribution of each set was compared to that of the population (i.e., Korean servicemen during the Korean War) using the Bayes factors and posterior probabilities generated by the R codes in the LearnBayes package.A higher Bayes factor indicates a closer similarity between the two distributions under comparison. The equation with the highest Bayes factor in this study was Choi et al.’s (1997) humerus equation (bf=9.84), followed by the femur equation of the same authors (bf=5.3).The Bayesian approach has advantages over the traditional frequentist approach primarily based on the p-value. Particularly, the Bayes factor can provide practical interpretations on the models under comparison, which allows for a quantitative prioritization of different models. Researchers can obtain more accurate stature estimates of a target sample by using the equation of the highest Bayes factor.

Human Casualties and War: Results of a National Epidemiologic Survey in Iran.

Limited studies have reported epidemiologic data on the impact of Iran-Iraq war. This study examines the war casualties for both combatants and civilians on Iranians at national level. Databases of Veterans and Martyrs Affair Foundation (VMAF), Janbazan Medical and Engineering Research Center (JMERC) and Ministry of Health were used to collect the data. The prevalence of injuries for both civilians and combatants was presented. Casualties were studied based on conventional and unconventional weapons attacks (1980-2018), separately. The Iran-Iraq war led to 183623 lost lives, 554990 injured and 40240 captured. The mean length of captivity was 45.7 months (1 month-19 years) and 2.7% (n = 575) died in captivity. There were 1439180 war related injuries recorded in databanks, mostly affecting men (98.4%). About 1439180 injuries were recorded, most of them related to conventional weapons (938928 [65.24%]). Remaining artillery and mortar fragmentation in the body (39.5%, n = 371236), psychological disorders (15.9%, n = 228944), and exposure to chemical weapons (11%, n = 158817) were the most prevalent war-related injuries. Human casualties of the Iran-Iraq war on the Iranian side and the health care system are huge even after more than three decades.

The Displaced as ‘Ordinary Citizens’: Exploring Variation in the Political Attitudes of the Displaced from Donbas

Based on original survey data, this essay analyses the political attitudes of individuals displaced by the war in eastern Ukraine. We systematically compare attitudinal differences and similarities along three axes: the displaced relative to the resident population; the displaced in Ukraine relative to the displaced in Russia; and the displaced from the (non-)government-controlled areas relative to the resident population in the (non-)government-controlled areas of Donbas. This fine-grained comparative analysis highlights the variety of attitudes held by the displaced, similarities in attitudes across displacement locations, and the effect of war casualties on attitudes and self-declared political interest.

Acute respiratory distress syndrome in the forward environment. Retrospective analysis of acute respiratory distress syndrome cases among French Army war casualties.

According to the Joint Theater Trauma Registry, 26% to 33% of war casualties develop acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), with high mortality. Here, we aimed to describe ARDS incidence and severity among patients evacuated from war zones and admitted to French intensive care units (ICUs). We performed an observational retrospective multicentric review of all patients evacuated from war zones and admitted to French ICUs between 2003 and 2018. Our analysis included all medical and trauma patients developing ARDS according to the Berlin definition. We evaluated ARDS incidence, and determined ARDS severity from arterial blood gas analysis. Analyzed parameters included invasive ventilation duration, ARDS treatments, ICU stay length, and 30-day and 90-day mortalities. Among 141 included patients (84% military; median age, 30 years), 57 (42%) developed ARDS. Acute respiratory distress syndrome was mild in 13 (22%) patients, moderate in 24 (42%) patients, and severe in 20 (36%) patients. Evacuation occurred in less than 26 hours for 32 war casualties, 17 non-war-related trauma patients, and 8 medical patients. Among severe trauma patients, median Injury Severity Score was 34, and Abbreviated Injury Scale thorax was 3. Upon French ICU admission, median partial pressure of oxygen in arterial blood/inspirated fraction of oxygen ratio was 241 [144-296]. Administered ARDS treatments included intubation (98%, n = 56), protective ventilation (87%, n = 49), neuromuscular blockade (76%, n = 43), prone position (16%, n = 9), inhaled nitric oxide (10%, n = 6), almitrine (7%, n = 7), and extracorporeal life support (4%, n = 2). Median duration of invasive ventilation was 13 days, ICU stay was 18 days, 30-day mortality was 14%, and 90-day mortality was 21%. Acute respiratory distress syndrome was frequent and severe among French patients evacuated from war theaters. Improved treatment capacities are needed in the forward environment-for example, a specialized US team can provide extracorporeal life support for highly hypoxemic war casualties. Prognostic and epidemiological study, level III.

Choreographies of Mourning

The language of 'climate grief' has recently been popularized across the English speaking world, with many in North America beginning to host regular 'climate grief circles'. These gatherings allow for the collective processing of feelings associated with climate-related grief. If the 'grief circle' is one common strategy for moving through personal grief within one's immediate context, the monument scales many of the same functions. Moved by Robert Nixon's provocative question, ‘what is a war casualty?’ (2011: 200), this paper considers how performance-based commemorative devices might calibrate to the paradigm shift of ecological collapse, so as to allow us to see, grieve, and respond to the more-than-human loss of military conflict. Mobilizing a choreo-political analytic to examine techniques of memorialization which cultivate affective resilience and complexity in response to anthropogenic loss, this paper examines the durational performance installation and living (counter-)monument Operations (1945-2006): Movements, developed by boundaries/conditions performance assembly. Operations stages a dynamic encounter between human dancers and non-human actants. A field of sod which blankets the performance space interrupts the dancer's choreographies with its unwieldy presence: the more it is worn down by their repetitive movements, the more it discloses its vibrant materiality (Bennett 2009). I argue that Operations champions the affective polyvalence explored by Timothy Morton's dark ecologies: through its particular strategies of durational commemoration, Operations allows for the slow emergence of affective response which relay between the dark and the sweet.

National Fears in Israeli Horror Films

Violence, wounds, blood, and death are common sights in the battlefield, which has been a favored setting for Israeli cinema from its outset. Local films, however, were not eager to linger over these corporeal horrors and were reluctant to expose the fragmented body and corpse. This has gradually changed, and these days it seems that Israeli cinema is as attracted to explicit images of graphic death as it is repulsed by them. The narratives have also changed, becoming more ideologically ambiguous, and therefore have been criticized by both sides of the political map. These shifts, which have been apparent in the dominant war genre, have permeated into other genres as well and have enabled the materialization of new forms. The death anxiety has been amplified in a wave of horror films that came out in the 2010s. They are harshly critical, and the monstrous enemies in them are internal. They attempt to address and solve problems that the creators of the war films were not fully capable of resolving. Their new style and content enable to deal with national historical traumas, as the casualties of war, and allow them to "reopen old wounds" in a manner that had not been attempted by Israeli filmmakers before.

Maternal Stress and Offspring Lifelong Labor Market Outcomes

This paper examines the effects of in-utero exposure to stress on lifelong labor market outcomes. We exploit a unique natural experiment that involved randomly placed Nazi raids on municipalities in Italy during WWII. We use administrative data on the universe of private sector workers in Italy and link this data to unique historical data with detailed information about war casualties and Nazi raids across space (Municipality) and time. We find that prenatal stress exposure leads to lower wage earnings when workers start their career, and that this effect persists until retirement. The earnings penalty is in large part due to the type of job that people hold and interruptions in their working career due to unemployment. We further show that workers exposed to in-utero stress face larger earnings reductions after job loss due to mass layoffs. This earnings loss deepens their relative disadvantage over time.