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Q & A: Barnyard Pestilence
By C. CLAIBORNE RAY, The New York Times, May 26, 2009
Q. Did all human infectious diseases originate in domesticated animals?
A. Of 25 infectious diseases that have historically caused high mortality in human beings, many probably or possibly reached humans from domesticated animals, according to a major review article published in Nature in 2007.
The main ones among so-called temperate diseases are diphtheria, influenza A, measles, mumps, pertussis, rotavirus, smallpox and tuberculosis. Three others probably came from apes (hepatitis B) or rodents (plague and typhus), the review says, and four other temperate diseases (rubella, syphilis, tetanus and typhoid) came from sources that are still unknown.
Among the important tropical diseases, the review says, domestic animal origins can be ruled out for 6 of the 10: AIDS, dengue fever, vivax malaria and yellow fever, all derived from wild primates; cholera, from aquatic algae and invertebrates; and falciparum malaria, from birds. The case is not clear for Chagas’ disease, West and East African sleeping sickness and visceral leishmaniasis, because the ancestors of the agents that cause them infect both domestic and wild mammals.
The strong links to domestic animals for the temperate diseases is tied to the rise of agriculture, 11,000 years ago, which allowed human populations to survive and pass on the diseases and brought these populations into frequent contact with source animals. The main reason few tropical diseases arose from domestic animals is that such animals have historically been concentrated mainly in the temperate zones. The sole abundant domestic animal to have originated in the tropics is the chicken, from Southeast Asia.
In a Time of Quotas, a Quiet Pose in Defiance
By BARRON H. LERNER, The New York Times, May 26, 2009
As a Jewish physician practicing medicine in 2009, I hardly ever pay attention to my religious affiliation.
But in the years before World War II, at my institution and at other medical schools, Judaism was very much on people’s minds. Informal quotas limited the numbers of Jewish medical students and physicians.
Within hospital walls, some non-Jewish physicians supported the quotas and others opposed them. An untold story from Columbia’s Neurological Institute demonstrates an ingenious attempt by one physician to thwart what he believed was an unjust policy.
A central reason that colleges and medical schools established quotas in the early 20th century was the immigration of millions of Eastern European Jews to New York and other cities. When children from these families pursued higher education, the percentage of Jewish applicants increased.
This competition from Jewish students promoted the emergence of traditional anti-Semitic stereotypes, Edward C. Halperin wrote in 2001 in The Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. Educators limited the number of Jews based on beliefs that they were too bookish, aggressive and greedy. Religious affiliation was deduced by studying students’ names, interviewing them and asking them directly on medical school applications.
“We limit the number of Jews admitted to each class to roughly the proportion of Jews in the population of the state,” the dean of Cornell University Medical College said in 1940, according to the journal article. At Yale Medical School, applications of Jewish students were marked with an “H” for “Hebrew.”
As a result, the number of Jewish students dropped. At the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, for example, the percentage of Jewish students fell to 6 percent from 47 percent between 1920 and 1940.
It is harder to document the exclusion of Jewish physicians, but this was occurring too. In “Time to Heal,” the medical historian Kenneth M. Ludmerer writes that quotas were even stricter for senior physician positions at university-affiliated hospitals.
Because hospitals put quotas into effect tacitly and rarely documented them, little has been written about how non-Jewish physicians responded to them. But in a new book, “The Legacy of Tracy J. Putnam and H. Houston Merritt,” Lewis P. Rowland, an emeritus professor of neurology at Columbia, provides insights into how such quotas worked in practice.
The quota system eventually began to break down, and Dr. Rowland suggests that one reason was the influx of refugee European Jewish physicians fleeing the Nazis in the late 1930s. At Columbia, the department of neurology had quietly hired several of these doctors, many of whom were quite eminent.
One, for example, was Otto Marburg, a Viennese neurologist who emigrated from Austria in 1938 with his friend Sigmund Freud.
But how could the presence of these physicians be squared with the informal policies discouraging the hiring of Jews? At Columbia’s Neurological Institute in the 1940s, Dr. Rowland writes, a curious solution emerged: the neurology service was divided in two. The East service contained no Jewish physicians while the West service contained 5 to 10 European Jews.
The mastermind behind this compromise was Dr. Putnam, a neurologist, neurosurgeon and psychiatrist who was named head of the Neurological Institute in 1939. A Boston Brahmin, Dr. Putnam was the vice chairman of the National Committee for Resettlement of Foreign Physicians. “It seems likely,” Dr. Rowland concludes, “that all of these European neurologists were appointed by Putnam.”
Dr. Putnam was forced to resign in 1947, ending his career at Columbia. Colleagues at the time suspected several reasons, including a lack of administrative skills, enemies on the staff and the conflicts that arose from having a neurosurgeon running a neurological institute.
But Dr. Rowland unearthed another explanation. A New York newspaper of the era, called PM, reported in 1947 that Dr. Putnam had been told to fire all of the “non-Aryan” neurologists, something he was unwilling to do.
Dr. Rowland corroborated this story when he discovered a 1961 letter written by Dr. Putnam to a fellow physician. Dr. Putnam reported that Charles Cooper, then head of Columbia’s affiliated hospital, Presbyterian, had told him in 1945 “that I should get rid of all the Jews in my department or resign.”
Although Dr. Putnam left, most of the Jewish neurologists stayed, under the leadership of Dr. Merritt. But Columbia did not have a Jewish physician as head of neurology until 1973, when Dr. Rowland was named to the position. He was only the third Jewish clinical chief at the institution.
Quotas for Jewish medical students and physicians disappeared fairly rapidly after World War II, partly in response to Nazi atrocities against the Jews. But Dr. Putnam’s quiet advocacy on behalf of Jewish physicians when such a stance was unpopular should not be forgotten.
Dr. Barron H. Lerner teaches medicine and public health at Columbia University Medical Center.
Autopsies of War Dead Reveal Ways to Save Others
By DENISE GRADY, The New York Times, May 26, 2009
Within an hour after the bodies arrive in their flag-draped coffins at Dover Air Force Base, they go through a process that has never been used on the dead from any other war.
Since 2004, every service man and woman killed in Iraq or Afghanistan has been given a CT scan, and since 2001, when the fighting began in Afghanistan, all have had autopsies, performed by pathologists in the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System. In previous wars, autopsies on people killed in combat were uncommon, and scans were never done.
The combined procedures have yielded a wealth of details about injuries from bullets, blasts, shrapnel and burns — information that has revealed deficiencies in body armor and vehicle shielding and led to improvements in helmets and medical equipment used on the battlefield.
The military world initially doubted the usefulness of scanning corpses but now eagerly seeks data from the scans, medical examiners say, noting that on a single day in April, they received six requests for information from the Defense Department and its contractors.
“We’ve created a huge database that’s never existed before,” said Capt. Craig T. Mallak, 48, a Navy pathologist and lawyer who is chief of the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System, a division of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology.
The medical examiners have scanned about 3,000 corpses, more than any other institution in the world, creating a minutely detailed and permanent three-dimensional record of combat injuries. Although the scans are sometimes called “virtual autopsies,” they do not replace old-fashioned autopsies. Rather, they add information and can help guide autopsies and speed them by showing pathologists where to look for bullets or shrapnel, and by revealing fractures and tissue damage so clearly that the need for lengthy dissection is sometimes eliminated. The examiners try to remove as many metal fragments as possible, because the pieces can yield information about enemy weapons.
One discovery led to an important change in the medical gear used to stabilize injured troops on the battlefield.
Col. Howard T. Harcke, a 71-year-old Marine Corps radiologist who delayed retirement to read CT scans at Dover, noticed something peculiar in late 2005. The emergency treatment for a collapsed lung involves inserting a needle and tube into the chest cavity to relieve pressure and allow the lung to reinflate. But in one case, Colonel Harcke could see from a scan that the tube was too short to reach the chest cavity. Then he saw another case, and another, and half a dozen more.
In an interview, Colonel Harcke said it was impossible to tell whether anyone had died because the tubes were too short; all had other severe injuries. But a collapsed lung can be life-threatening, so proper treatment is essential.
Colonel Harcke pulled 100 scans from the archives and used them to calculate the average thickness of the chest wall in American troops; he found that the standard tubing, five centimeters long, was too short for 50 percent of the troops. If the tubing was lengthened to eight centimeters, it would be long enough for 99 percent.
“Soldiers are bigger and stronger now,” Colonel Harcke said.
The findings were presented to the Army Surgeon General, who in August 2006 ordered that the kits given to combat medics be changed to include only the longer tubing.
“I was thrilled,” Colonel Harcke said.
The medical examiners also discovered that troops were dying from wounds to the upper body that could have been prevented by body armor that covered more of the torso and shoulders. The information, which became public in 2006, led the military to scramble to ship more armor plates to Iraq.
It was Captain Mallak who decided that autopsies should be performed on all troops killed in Afghanistan or Iraq. Federal law gives him that authority.
“Families want a full accounting,” he said. During World War II and the Vietnam War, he explained, families were told simply that their loved one had died in service of their country.
“Personally, I felt that families would no longer just accept that,” Captain Mallak said.
The examiner’s office has not publicized the autopsy policy and has not often discussed it. Families are informed that autopsies are being performed and that they can request a copy of the report. Occasionally, families object, but the autopsy is done anyway. About 85 percent to 90 percent of families request the reports, and 10 percent also ask for photographs from the autopsy, said Paul Stone, a spokesman for the medical examiner system. Relatives are also told they can call or e-mail the medical examiners with questions.
“Every day, families come back for more information,” Captain Mallak said. “The No. 1 question they want to know is, ‘Did my loved one suffer?’ If we can say, ‘No, it was instantaneous, he or she never knew what happened,’ they do get a great sense of relief out of that. But we don’t lie.”
Indeed, the reports are sent with cover letters urging the families not to read them alone.
The possibility that a relative burned to death is a particular source of anguish for families, and one area in which CT can outperform an autopsy. In a body damaged by flames, CT can help pathologists figure out whether the burns occurred before or after death. The scans can also tell whether a person found in water died from drowning. Families who request the autopsy reports often put off reading them, said Ami Neiberger-Miller, a spokeswoman for the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors, a nonprofit group for people who have lost relatives in war.
“I think people feel, ‘We should request it; we may not want to read it today, but we may want to read it 10 years from now,’ ” Ms. Neiberger-Miller said. Her brother was killed in Baghdad in 2007, she said, and her family has never opened his autopsy report.
Liz Sweet, whose 23-year-old son, T. J., committed suicide in Iraq in 2003, requested his autopsy report and read it.
“For our family, we needed it,” Mrs. Sweet said. “I just felt better knowing I had that report.” T. J. Sweet’s coffin was closed, so Mrs. Sweet asked Captain Mallak for a photograph taken before the autopsy, to prove to herself that it really was her son who had died.
“He was one of the most compassionate people throughout this whole process that I dealt with from the Department of Defense,” Mrs. Sweet said of Captain Mallak.
The scans and autopsies are done in a 70,000-square-foot facility at the Dover base that is both a pathology laboratory and a mortuary. Journalists are not allowed inside. The CT scanning began in 2004, when it was suggested and paid for by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, part of the Defense Department. Darpa got the idea of using CT scanners to perform virtual autopsies from Switzerland, where it started about 10 years ago.
Now the idea of virtual autopsies has begun to catch on with medical examiners in this country, who are eager to use it in murder cases but also to learn the cause of death in people from religious groups that forbid traditional autopsies. Scans can also help pathologists plan limited autopsies if a family finds a complete one too invasive.
John Getz, the program manager for the Armed Forces medical examiners, said mobile CT scanners could also be used to screen mass casualties during disasters like Hurricane Katrina, to help with identification and also to determine if any of the dead were the victims of crimes rather than accidents.
The Armed Forces CT scanner, specially designed to scan entire corpses one after another, is the envy of medical examiners and crime laboratories around the country, and several states have asked Captain Mallak and his colleagues for advice on setting up scanners.
Colonel Harcke said he hoped the technology would help to increase the autopsy rates at civilian hospitals, which now perform them only 5 percent to 10 percent of the time.
“We hope to return to a time where we were 50 years ago,” he said, “when autopsies were an important part of the medical model, and we continued to learn after death.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: May 26, 2009
A caption made a reference to autopsies performed under the authority of Capt. Craig T. Mallak, saying autopsies and CT scans were being carried out on all service members killed in Iran and Afghanistan. The reference should have been to service members who were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
By C. CLAIBORNE RAY, The New York Times, May 26, 2009
Q. Did all human infectious diseases originate in domesticated animals?
A. Of 25 infectious diseases that have historically caused high mortality in human beings, many probably or possibly reached humans from domesticated animals, according to a major review article published in Nature in 2007.
The main ones among so-called temperate diseases are diphtheria, influenza A, measles, mumps, pertussis, rotavirus, smallpox and tuberculosis. Three others probably came from apes (hepatitis B) or rodents (plague and typhus), the review says, and four other temperate diseases (rubella, syphilis, tetanus and typhoid) came from sources that are still unknown.
Among the important tropical diseases, the review says, domestic animal origins can be ruled out for 6 of the 10: AIDS, dengue fever, vivax malaria and yellow fever, all derived from wild primates; cholera, from aquatic algae and invertebrates; and falciparum malaria, from birds. The case is not clear for Chagas’ disease, West and East African sleeping sickness and visceral leishmaniasis, because the ancestors of the agents that cause them infect both domestic and wild mammals.
The strong links to domestic animals for the temperate diseases is tied to the rise of agriculture, 11,000 years ago, which allowed human populations to survive and pass on the diseases and brought these populations into frequent contact with source animals. The main reason few tropical diseases arose from domestic animals is that such animals have historically been concentrated mainly in the temperate zones. The sole abundant domestic animal to have originated in the tropics is the chicken, from Southeast Asia.
In a Time of Quotas, a Quiet Pose in Defiance
By BARRON H. LERNER, The New York Times, May 26, 2009
As a Jewish physician practicing medicine in 2009, I hardly ever pay attention to my religious affiliation.
But in the years before World War II, at my institution and at other medical schools, Judaism was very much on people’s minds. Informal quotas limited the numbers of Jewish medical students and physicians.
Within hospital walls, some non-Jewish physicians supported the quotas and others opposed them. An untold story from Columbia’s Neurological Institute demonstrates an ingenious attempt by one physician to thwart what he believed was an unjust policy.
A central reason that colleges and medical schools established quotas in the early 20th century was the immigration of millions of Eastern European Jews to New York and other cities. When children from these families pursued higher education, the percentage of Jewish applicants increased.
This competition from Jewish students promoted the emergence of traditional anti-Semitic stereotypes, Edward C. Halperin wrote in 2001 in The Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. Educators limited the number of Jews based on beliefs that they were too bookish, aggressive and greedy. Religious affiliation was deduced by studying students’ names, interviewing them and asking them directly on medical school applications.
“We limit the number of Jews admitted to each class to roughly the proportion of Jews in the population of the state,” the dean of Cornell University Medical College said in 1940, according to the journal article. At Yale Medical School, applications of Jewish students were marked with an “H” for “Hebrew.”
As a result, the number of Jewish students dropped. At the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, for example, the percentage of Jewish students fell to 6 percent from 47 percent between 1920 and 1940.
It is harder to document the exclusion of Jewish physicians, but this was occurring too. In “Time to Heal,” the medical historian Kenneth M. Ludmerer writes that quotas were even stricter for senior physician positions at university-affiliated hospitals.
Because hospitals put quotas into effect tacitly and rarely documented them, little has been written about how non-Jewish physicians responded to them. But in a new book, “The Legacy of Tracy J. Putnam and H. Houston Merritt,” Lewis P. Rowland, an emeritus professor of neurology at Columbia, provides insights into how such quotas worked in practice.
The quota system eventually began to break down, and Dr. Rowland suggests that one reason was the influx of refugee European Jewish physicians fleeing the Nazis in the late 1930s. At Columbia, the department of neurology had quietly hired several of these doctors, many of whom were quite eminent.
One, for example, was Otto Marburg, a Viennese neurologist who emigrated from Austria in 1938 with his friend Sigmund Freud.
But how could the presence of these physicians be squared with the informal policies discouraging the hiring of Jews? At Columbia’s Neurological Institute in the 1940s, Dr. Rowland writes, a curious solution emerged: the neurology service was divided in two. The East service contained no Jewish physicians while the West service contained 5 to 10 European Jews.
The mastermind behind this compromise was Dr. Putnam, a neurologist, neurosurgeon and psychiatrist who was named head of the Neurological Institute in 1939. A Boston Brahmin, Dr. Putnam was the vice chairman of the National Committee for Resettlement of Foreign Physicians. “It seems likely,” Dr. Rowland concludes, “that all of these European neurologists were appointed by Putnam.”
Dr. Putnam was forced to resign in 1947, ending his career at Columbia. Colleagues at the time suspected several reasons, including a lack of administrative skills, enemies on the staff and the conflicts that arose from having a neurosurgeon running a neurological institute.
But Dr. Rowland unearthed another explanation. A New York newspaper of the era, called PM, reported in 1947 that Dr. Putnam had been told to fire all of the “non-Aryan” neurologists, something he was unwilling to do.
Dr. Rowland corroborated this story when he discovered a 1961 letter written by Dr. Putnam to a fellow physician. Dr. Putnam reported that Charles Cooper, then head of Columbia’s affiliated hospital, Presbyterian, had told him in 1945 “that I should get rid of all the Jews in my department or resign.”
Although Dr. Putnam left, most of the Jewish neurologists stayed, under the leadership of Dr. Merritt. But Columbia did not have a Jewish physician as head of neurology until 1973, when Dr. Rowland was named to the position. He was only the third Jewish clinical chief at the institution.
Quotas for Jewish medical students and physicians disappeared fairly rapidly after World War II, partly in response to Nazi atrocities against the Jews. But Dr. Putnam’s quiet advocacy on behalf of Jewish physicians when such a stance was unpopular should not be forgotten.
Dr. Barron H. Lerner teaches medicine and public health at Columbia University Medical Center.
Autopsies of War Dead Reveal Ways to Save Others
By DENISE GRADY, The New York Times, May 26, 2009
Within an hour after the bodies arrive in their flag-draped coffins at Dover Air Force Base, they go through a process that has never been used on the dead from any other war.
Since 2004, every service man and woman killed in Iraq or Afghanistan has been given a CT scan, and since 2001, when the fighting began in Afghanistan, all have had autopsies, performed by pathologists in the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System. In previous wars, autopsies on people killed in combat were uncommon, and scans were never done.
The combined procedures have yielded a wealth of details about injuries from bullets, blasts, shrapnel and burns — information that has revealed deficiencies in body armor and vehicle shielding and led to improvements in helmets and medical equipment used on the battlefield.
The military world initially doubted the usefulness of scanning corpses but now eagerly seeks data from the scans, medical examiners say, noting that on a single day in April, they received six requests for information from the Defense Department and its contractors.
“We’ve created a huge database that’s never existed before,” said Capt. Craig T. Mallak, 48, a Navy pathologist and lawyer who is chief of the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System, a division of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology.
The medical examiners have scanned about 3,000 corpses, more than any other institution in the world, creating a minutely detailed and permanent three-dimensional record of combat injuries. Although the scans are sometimes called “virtual autopsies,” they do not replace old-fashioned autopsies. Rather, they add information and can help guide autopsies and speed them by showing pathologists where to look for bullets or shrapnel, and by revealing fractures and tissue damage so clearly that the need for lengthy dissection is sometimes eliminated. The examiners try to remove as many metal fragments as possible, because the pieces can yield information about enemy weapons.
One discovery led to an important change in the medical gear used to stabilize injured troops on the battlefield.
Col. Howard T. Harcke, a 71-year-old Marine Corps radiologist who delayed retirement to read CT scans at Dover, noticed something peculiar in late 2005. The emergency treatment for a collapsed lung involves inserting a needle and tube into the chest cavity to relieve pressure and allow the lung to reinflate. But in one case, Colonel Harcke could see from a scan that the tube was too short to reach the chest cavity. Then he saw another case, and another, and half a dozen more.
In an interview, Colonel Harcke said it was impossible to tell whether anyone had died because the tubes were too short; all had other severe injuries. But a collapsed lung can be life-threatening, so proper treatment is essential.
Colonel Harcke pulled 100 scans from the archives and used them to calculate the average thickness of the chest wall in American troops; he found that the standard tubing, five centimeters long, was too short for 50 percent of the troops. If the tubing was lengthened to eight centimeters, it would be long enough for 99 percent.
“Soldiers are bigger and stronger now,” Colonel Harcke said.
The findings were presented to the Army Surgeon General, who in August 2006 ordered that the kits given to combat medics be changed to include only the longer tubing.
“I was thrilled,” Colonel Harcke said.
The medical examiners also discovered that troops were dying from wounds to the upper body that could have been prevented by body armor that covered more of the torso and shoulders. The information, which became public in 2006, led the military to scramble to ship more armor plates to Iraq.
It was Captain Mallak who decided that autopsies should be performed on all troops killed in Afghanistan or Iraq. Federal law gives him that authority.
“Families want a full accounting,” he said. During World War II and the Vietnam War, he explained, families were told simply that their loved one had died in service of their country.
“Personally, I felt that families would no longer just accept that,” Captain Mallak said.
The examiner’s office has not publicized the autopsy policy and has not often discussed it. Families are informed that autopsies are being performed and that they can request a copy of the report. Occasionally, families object, but the autopsy is done anyway. About 85 percent to 90 percent of families request the reports, and 10 percent also ask for photographs from the autopsy, said Paul Stone, a spokesman for the medical examiner system. Relatives are also told they can call or e-mail the medical examiners with questions.
“Every day, families come back for more information,” Captain Mallak said. “The No. 1 question they want to know is, ‘Did my loved one suffer?’ If we can say, ‘No, it was instantaneous, he or she never knew what happened,’ they do get a great sense of relief out of that. But we don’t lie.”
Indeed, the reports are sent with cover letters urging the families not to read them alone.
The possibility that a relative burned to death is a particular source of anguish for families, and one area in which CT can outperform an autopsy. In a body damaged by flames, CT can help pathologists figure out whether the burns occurred before or after death. The scans can also tell whether a person found in water died from drowning. Families who request the autopsy reports often put off reading them, said Ami Neiberger-Miller, a spokeswoman for the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors, a nonprofit group for people who have lost relatives in war.
“I think people feel, ‘We should request it; we may not want to read it today, but we may want to read it 10 years from now,’ ” Ms. Neiberger-Miller said. Her brother was killed in Baghdad in 2007, she said, and her family has never opened his autopsy report.
Liz Sweet, whose 23-year-old son, T. J., committed suicide in Iraq in 2003, requested his autopsy report and read it.
“For our family, we needed it,” Mrs. Sweet said. “I just felt better knowing I had that report.” T. J. Sweet’s coffin was closed, so Mrs. Sweet asked Captain Mallak for a photograph taken before the autopsy, to prove to herself that it really was her son who had died.
“He was one of the most compassionate people throughout this whole process that I dealt with from the Department of Defense,” Mrs. Sweet said of Captain Mallak.
The scans and autopsies are done in a 70,000-square-foot facility at the Dover base that is both a pathology laboratory and a mortuary. Journalists are not allowed inside. The CT scanning began in 2004, when it was suggested and paid for by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, part of the Defense Department. Darpa got the idea of using CT scanners to perform virtual autopsies from Switzerland, where it started about 10 years ago.
Now the idea of virtual autopsies has begun to catch on with medical examiners in this country, who are eager to use it in murder cases but also to learn the cause of death in people from religious groups that forbid traditional autopsies. Scans can also help pathologists plan limited autopsies if a family finds a complete one too invasive.
John Getz, the program manager for the Armed Forces medical examiners, said mobile CT scanners could also be used to screen mass casualties during disasters like Hurricane Katrina, to help with identification and also to determine if any of the dead were the victims of crimes rather than accidents.
The Armed Forces CT scanner, specially designed to scan entire corpses one after another, is the envy of medical examiners and crime laboratories around the country, and several states have asked Captain Mallak and his colleagues for advice on setting up scanners.
Colonel Harcke said he hoped the technology would help to increase the autopsy rates at civilian hospitals, which now perform them only 5 percent to 10 percent of the time.
“We hope to return to a time where we were 50 years ago,” he said, “when autopsies were an important part of the medical model, and we continued to learn after death.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: May 26, 2009
A caption made a reference to autopsies performed under the authority of Capt. Craig T. Mallak, saying autopsies and CT scans were being carried out on all service members killed in Iran and Afghanistan. The reference should have been to service members who were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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Date: 2009-05-26 07:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-27 02:53 pm (UTC)