This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Related article  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

To the Editor: Dr Grissom and colleagues¹ reported that an artificial air pocket device may reduce mortality among avalanche survivors by preventing asphyxia under the conditions of their study. While this device may increase the survival time of a buried individual who would otherwise die from asphyxia, it does not decrease the time to rescue, which is important given that one third of avalanche victims die from trauma.² Buried avalanche survivors who cannot be quickly located by visual or acoustic contact have the highest chance for survival (45%) if they use a rescue transceiver,² which is considered the principal tool for finding buried victims.³

In a 45-year analysis of avalanche deaths in the United States, climbers, backcountry skiers, out-of-bound skiers, and snowmobilers comprised 25.5%, 22.7%, 10.0%, and 6.8% of fatalities, respectively.⁴ The size and weight of the device (not reported) may limit its use by some of these groups.

A . . . [Full Text of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?

RELATED ARTICLE

Respiration During Snow Burial Using an Artificial Air Pocket
Colin K. Grissom, Martin I. Radwin, Chris H. Harmston, Ellie L. Hirshberg, and Thomas J. Crowley
JAMA. 2000;283(17):2266-2271.
ABSTRACT | FULL TEXT