Asphyxia

Tasteless and odorless carbon monoxide crumples the coal miner, turns his body cherry red. From the exhaust pipe of his automobile comes the same deadly gas to fell the careless motorist who lets his engine run in a tight-shut garage. Housewives leave unlit gas stoves turned on and whole families perish. Unskilled operators give surgical patients too much anesthesia. Faulty furnaces kill college boys in their beds. Newborn babies breathe once or twice, then breathe no more. . . . In these ways and in many another Death by Asphyxia comes some 50,000 times a year to the U. S.

Meeting last week in Manhattan, members of the year-old Society for the Prevention of Asphyxial Deaths were agreed that at least 15,000 of these lives could be saved if U. S. doctors were properly trained, U. S. hospitals adequately equipped. Urgently the Society called on medical schools and hospitals to expand their teaching and equipment, centralize their scattered units of resuscitation, anesthesia and oxygen therapy in a single department of gas therapy.

Of the 50,000 yearly deaths by asphyxia approximately 35% are caused by carbon monoxide. Many a carbon monoxide victim dies after his breathing has been restored, the poison cleansed from his blood. For three years U. S. Public Health Service and Bureau of Mines researchers have sought, through experiments on cats & dogs, to discover the cause of and remedy for such failures in resuscitation. They have found, reported Dr. Royd Ray Sayer of the U. S. P. H. S., that both carbon monoxide poisoning and lack of oxygen not only stop respiration but also injure brain cells and the central nervous system. Insufficient, therefore, is ordinary oxygen resuscitation. Victims must also have pressure on their brains eased by catharsis, spine punctures or bleeding. Roundly Dr. Sayer condemned the use of blood transfusions which, said he, by increasing brain pressure only makes matters worse.

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