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Herbert L. Abrams, MD
Boston

JAMA. 1985;253(10):1391.

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

In Reply.—

Dr Sherman believes that my discussion of available beds for casualties of a massive nuclear exchange neglected an important resource—nursing homes. Using an analytic approach derived from that on which my article was based, he suggests that 280,000 additional beds might by available for the 2 million injured.

I deliberately excluded nursing homes from consideration because the great majority of them are incapable of providing acute care to the blast-, burn-, and radiation-injured patient. They are, in fact, largely a custodial resource rather than an acute medical resource.

Furthermore, Dr Sherman points out that "there will be few nursing home survivors." That is surely true of the occupants of the large number of nursing homes destroyed in the exchange; the survivors will, of course, occupy the available beds in the nursing homes that remain. Dr Sherman describes one scenario in which "all nursing home patients could be moved . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

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