"Marc" wrote in message
...
On Mon, 03 Nov 2003 13:43:34 GMT, "Greg D. Moore \(Strider\)"
wrote:

Had they had to leave the station due to a medical emergency (say
ruptured
appendix) the additional time spent locating the crew may have been
enough
to be fatal.

Most medical emergencies would be a problem no matter how you came
down, due to the simple problem of how long it would take to re-enter.
I would personally not be pleased with the need to put a patient
through the process of re-entry at any point, regardless of method.

I believe setup to re-entry to landing can be accomplished in under 90
minutes if required.

The TMA-2 landing I think added 3 hours to the recovery time. So that's a
big difference.


Yes, the additional delay would make matters even worse, but I suspect
that a little more care would be taken by all agencies in that
scenario.

What more care would be taken? The software bug was there. It went
undetected until activated, Russia lost track of the capsule. In an
emergency it's possible they'll have even less tracking available.


Generally speaking, in a medical emergency you need active treatment
within the first hour for a good prognosis.

In a trauma such as a vehicular collision, etc, yes. The so called Golden
Hour. In other cases, such as the onset of most infectious diseases you
have more time. The first course of action of course would be to try to
treat the patient on-board with antibiotics and appropriate antivirals if
available.

Otherwise you do have the issue of trauma, etc. You probably can't make it
to a class 1 trauma center within an hour, but 2-3 hours sure beats 5-6
hours. Especially if part of the 2-3 is spent in supervised medical care,
not sitting in the middle of a field somplace trying to call up for help.

The "magic hour" is vital,
and realistically it's your fellow crewmembers that'd be the people
attending you in that time. It's a gruesome thought that if a medical
emergency is serious enough to warrant an evac, often they're too far
from help for it to be much good.

As a side note,I know when Australian crew go to Antartica, we remove
everyone's appendix before sending them down even further Down Under.

Do you have a cite for that? Other than over-winter, that seems like a
really bad medical decision. Especially considering that most bases have
access to trained medical personal year-round. I can perhaps seeing it done
for overwinter, but even then seems a bit too much.

Does NASA do the same with their astronauts before space flight?

No.



cheers,
Tony (leaning over Marc's shoulder)