New Technology For Bleeding Wounds

In an effort to keep our readers abreast of new items that might be useful for survival, we like to showcase products that are new and promising.  One has a new twist on some old technology, that of a sponge, to deal with stubborn bleeding wounds, especially gunshot and stab injuries.

The U.S. military is testing something called X-STAT, and it uses tiny sponges to get deep into areas that normal bandages can’t.  Compression is important to stop bleeding, and X-STAT, made by RevMedX, can work to stop arterial bleeding deep in a wound.  Arterial bleeding is visibly different from venous bleeding: Arterial blood is bright red and comes out in spurts corresponding to the pulse of a victim, while venous blood is blackish-red and streams out relatively evenly.

X-STAT

Packaged in a syringe, X-STAT dime-sized sponge pellets are injected into the wound, where they expand and apply pressure where the bleeding is occurring.  The magazine “Popular Science” reports that this action takes only 15 seconds to stop bleeding, and is referred to as “Plug and Play”.  Each pellet is impregnated with blood-clotting powder, and the syringes will come in various sizes.

If commercially available, this product would be a useful addition to anyone’s survival medical storage. The majority of avoidable traumatic deaths are caused by hemorrhage, and the medically self-reliant individual would do well to have multiple options to stop the bleeding.

RevMedX representatives state: “A significant number of wounds occur to regions of the torso where compression cannot be applied, such as the pelvis or shoulder … By working closely with the US Army Medical Research and Materiel Command and US Special Operations Command, we succeeded in developing a novel hemostatic dressing capable of stopping high-flow arterial bleeding within seconds without external compression.”

Predicting success without compression is a pretty big claim, and I would recommend compression as the cornerstone for bleeding control.  If it doesn’t work, though, X-STAT might be worth a shot.