From an article in the U.S. military newspaper Stars and Stripes:
Critical in saving the lives of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, quick battlefield care and air evacuation have also allowed servicemembers whose brains have irreversibly stopped functioning but whose hearts and lungs are sustained artificially to be flown to Landstuhl [in Germany], where their relatives can say goodbye and organs can be donated to those in need.
Guidelines issued in March by the military’s Joint Theater Trauma System, which provides medical research and guidance for battlefield care, require that all brain-dead patients, when possible, be flown to Landstuhl or stateside hospitals. The military had been flying brain-dead patients from combat zones before the guidelines, but the decision to declare brain death and remove life support downrange was done on a case-by-case basis.
Now, the guidelines keep downrange doctors from having to make the difficult decision of whether to remove life support, and that means more potential organ donors.
The recent wars have made Landstuhl one of the more active donor hospitals in Germany, said Dr. Thomas Breidenbach, the former director of Deutsche Stiftung Organtransplantation’s central region, which oversees transplants in the Landstuhl area. In the past five years, 36 U.S. servicemembers have donated 141 organs to gravely ill patients. Because organs deteriorate quickly and cannot last a transatlantic flight, troops’ organs harvested at Landstuhl are always transplanted in Europe, most often to German patients.
Guess World War II really is over.
