Forward Observer: Invisible Wounds

Rep. Gene Taylor, D-Miss., already one of the GI's best friends in Congress, has launched himself on a new mission in hopes of sparing thousands of service men and women the misery of brain damage inflicted by hidden bombs in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Old-fashioned bombs have turned out to be the enemy's most diabolical weapon, inflicting two-thirds of the casualties.

The bombs seem to be everywhere in Afghanistan and Iraq: buried in the ground; crammed into vehicles; under the cloaks of suicidal men, women and children; on the tips of rockets.

The long-lasting damage inflicted on the brains of troopers near the blasts is just beginning to be understood. Congress, the president, the private and government medical communities and thousands of families are staring at an epidemic of brain trauma that will last 50 years.

"With IEDs [improvised explosive devices], the insurgents have by dumb luck developed a weapon system that targets our medical weakness: treating brain injury," Kevin Parker, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Harvard University and an Army reserve captain who served in Afghanistan, told Technology Review, a magazine published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Review's long article, which described new findings about what explosives might be doing to the brains of troopers, helped spur Taylor to action.

One such new finding, or at least a strong suspicion, is that an explosion not only rocks the brain and hurls it against the hard inside surface of the skull but also sends an electromagnetic pulse into the brain.

Scientists studying computer models of the head believe the main passageways to the brain for an explosion's damaging forces are the eyes and sinuses. Present day brain scanners cannot detect damage from electrical hits, according to scientists. Taylor wants to find out if today's helmets could be quickly modified and grounding gear added to body armor to protect troopers' brains.

"The brain is an electrical organ," reasons Army Col. Geoffrey Ling, an Iraqi veteran who is now studying the brain as a neurologist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and as a program director at the Pentagon's advanced research projects agency. "If an electromagnetic pulse can take out a radio, why not short circuit the brain?" he asked Technology Review.

Taylor told CongressDaily that the logical first step for educating Congress on that and other possible causes of traumatic brain injury is to hear from Ling and other experts.

Taylor said the quickest way for the lawmakers to get educated is to hold a briefing rather than take the time to organize formal hearings. His plan is to start out by mobilizing the House Armed Services Seapower Subcommittee, which he chairs, and the Air and Land Forces Subcommittees, chaired by Rep. Neil Abercrombie, D-Hawaii.

If the experts make the case for redesigning helmets and equipping troopers with ground gear to prevent brain damage, Taylor and others who have pushed the Pentagon into fielding body armor and IED-resistant vehicles almost certainly will demand that the Pentagon do more to safeguard the brains of deployed service people.

Taylor said there is still time for the Senate to add language to its fiscal 2009 defense authorization bill to finance protective gear for the brain if the case is made by the experts.

The House has already passed its authorization bill but could go along during the conference on the two measures with whatever traumatic brain injury language the Senate passed.

"I was not aware of the scale of the problem," Taylor told me.

Beside the disclosures about TBI in MIT's technical journal, the Rand Corp. think tank in a recent report on the invisible wounds suffered by GIs in Afghanistan and Iraq estimated "that approximately 300,000 individuals currently suffer from post traumatic stress disorder or major depression and that 320,000 individuals experienced a probable TBI during deployment."

Despite all the talk in Congress and the Bush administration about giving our GIs top-notch health care, the Rand study concluded that "of those who have a mental disorder and also sought medical care for that problem, just over half received a minimally adequate treatment."

Since the military forces in Afghanistan and Iraq are young, the government will be obligated to treat their invisible wounds for 50 years or more. The cost of that care is incalculable but will certainly be in the high billions of dollars.

Rand estimated that the cost of treating one trooper's TBI problems could run as high as $408,517 a year in 2007 dollars.

Several non-government physicians I have interviewed while investigating PTSD and TBI predicted the public and private health agencies will be overwhelmed as they try to treat thousands of Afghan and Iraqi veterans suffering from those invisible wounds.

The government will be driven by veterans' needs into a national healthcare system, they further predicted, whether physicians and drug companies like it or not.

In the meantime, it should soon become obvious to all the lawmakers, not just Taylor and his allies, that prevention of invisible wounds is the best cure.