Word: postmortem
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Despite the undeniable progress of the Apollo postmortem, there were some glitches. A vital rubber glove used to reach into the vacuum chamber holding the lunar rocks and equipment cracked, causing air to rush into the chamber. Two technicians, exposed to lunar material, were quickly placed in quarantine, at least until the astronauts get a clean bill of health. The plumbing presented a more familiar problem. Twice a urinal backed up in an unquarantined section of the spanking new $15.8 million lab. That caused a full day's delay in experiments...
...University of Colorado Medical Center in Denver. Only 2½ years old, Julie made surgical history by living for a record 13 months after a liver transplant, the most difficult organ transfer yet attempted. Death resulted from a recurrence of the cancer that first made the transplant necessary. The postmortem showed the new liver, despite some cancerous invasion, worked well to the last...
...unless it is specially processed, and little of this is now produced. Human growth hormone must be extracted, in minute quantities, from the pituitaries of cadavers. Each year the National Pituitary Agency in Baltimore gets about 75,000 of these glands, mostly from pathologists exploring the skull in postmortem examinations. The agency supplies the Hopkins with extracts from the glands. It takes the hormone from 150 or more glands to treat one child for a year. For victims of the commonest type of dwarfism, achondroplasia, marked by short limbs, large heads and "scooped out" noses, no hormonal or other treatment...
Only about 30% of U.S. deaths are followed by autopsies, and when postmortem findings are compared with ante-mortem diagnoses, glaring discrepancies often occur. Less than 50% of all cases of pulmonary embolism (in which a massive blood clot travels to the lungs) is correctly diagnosed before death. In 200 cases of bleeding from the gastrointestinal tract, the diagnosis was wrong 33% of the time, and 37 cases of bleeding peptic ulcer were missed. Among 85 cases of liver abscess, 53 were unsuspected until the autopsy...
Precise Estimates. Even after the visible debris of war has been cleaned up, the stain left on Arab pride by the furious events of last week may well remain for years. "Our estimates of the enemy's strength were precise," said Nasser in his postmortem. "They showed us that our armed forces had reached a level of equipment and training at which they were capable of deterring and repelling the enemy." The failure to do just that may sooner or later bring down Arab rulers all over the Middle East, and it will make the Arab dream of unity...