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" If a soldier takes a shot to the arm, his comrades can tighten a tourniquet above the wound to prevent major blood loss. Not so if the wound occurs on his torso. The blood loss could be so severe that even if the soldier gets to a hospital quickly, it could be too late to save his life. &amp;quot;These are potentially preventable deaths,&amp;quot; says Chirag Gajjar, a doctoral student at North Carolina State University. &amp;quot;If we have the right materials to slow down or stop the flow of blood, we could have more time to treat the person.&amp;quot; PM met Gajjar at this week&amp;#039;s Biomedical Engineering Society annual meeting in Atlanta, where he explained that there are materials available that can be used to make bandages that slow down blood flow from the torso, but they&amp;#039;re expensive and hard to come by. Gajjar, along with adviser Marian McCord, is working to find a textile that is hemostatic (blood-stopping) and also readily available. Glass fiber is an excellent material for slowing down blood flow, but it can&amp;#039;t be used to dress wounds because glass particles can get into the body and cause damage. So Gajjar&amp;#039;s team tried to replicate the properties of glass fibers in materials that people can wear every day. They found that a chemical called tetraethyl orthosilicate (TEOS) has properties similar to those of the surface of glass, but with none of the damaging side effects. In an experiment the team coated a variety of fabrics\u2014such as cotton, polyester, and nylon\u2014with TEOS and mixed the fabric samples together with human blood plasma. They measured the time it took for each sample to begin forming thrombin, a blood-clotting agent. The treated fabrics reduced the time it took for the plasma to begin clotting by 25 to 30 percent, and the treated cotton worked the best. &amp;quot;It was not as close to glass as we would like, but the time to clotting can be significantly reduced by using chemical treatments,&amp;quot; Gajjar says. And that means the treated fabrics could potentially close up wounds faster and save more lives than traditional bandages. By experimenting with different chemicals and different treatments, the team hopes to eventually create a bandage that can stop blood flow twice as fast as a regular bandage. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/a3013/smart-bandages-could-staunch-blood-flow-from-wounds-14098774/>