Wikipedia, Crush Syndrome, and You
As you may have heard if you have been watching the news, a Maglev train in Germany has been in an accident killing dozens of people. While reading about it on CNN's site, the article referenced Germany's worst rail accident, the 1998 Eschede train disaster.
The Wikipedia article indicated that amongst the causes of the high loss of life, was the design of the bridge, which was not cantilevered. A similar bridge design also caused the high lose of life in the Granville railway disaster in Australia in 1977.
Additional fatalities occurred during the Australian disaster because, as people who had been pinned down were freed, Crush Syndrome, a type of reperfusion injury, set in, allowing toxins which had built up and been trapped in the pinned sections of their bodies to become free and circulate into their blood supply, effectively poisoning them.
And that my friends is how I learn a ton of stuff about nothing at all.
The Wikipedia article indicated that amongst the causes of the high loss of life, was the design of the bridge, which was not cantilevered. A similar bridge design also caused the high lose of life in the Granville railway disaster in Australia in 1977.
Additional fatalities occurred during the Australian disaster because, as people who had been pinned down were freed, Crush Syndrome, a type of reperfusion injury, set in, allowing toxins which had built up and been trapped in the pinned sections of their bodies to become free and circulate into their blood supply, effectively poisoning them.
And that my friends is how I learn a ton of stuff about nothing at all.
posted by Yen at
3:42 PM
1 Comments:
I'm rather upset about the way the media is portraying this accident. All the headlines I've seen mention that it was a high tech maglev train and that it crashed and killed a lot of people. I think if you ask the average barely news literate person about the accident, that is about all they know. The next time they are in a position to interact with a maglev train, their thoughts will likely be about how they remember that these newfangled things are prone to crashing and killing people.
The point of this rant is that little footnote well down in most of the news stories: The train ran into a truck on the tracks at 125 miles an hour.
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Anonymous, at 8:47 PM
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