A New Center Is Escalating The Military's Fight Against Potentially Deadly Heat-Related Injuries

Speaker 1: 00:00 The number of reported heat related injuries in the military has skyrocketed in the past few years, so the Pentagon is turning one base into a world center for fighting those injuries. Jay price of the American Homefront project reports from Fort Benning, Georgia Speaker 2: 00:15 reported cases of heat exhaustion jumped nearly 50% between 2014 and 2018 according to Pentagon data and much more serious heat strokes. When a victim's core temperature can soar so far out of control that it can be fatal. Rose nearly 68% one particular army installation is at the heart of this growing battle. Speaker 3: 00:38 Something to keep in mind here at Fort Benning is that we don't really truly have a heat season. Speaker 2: 00:42 That's major David de Groot teaching a class of army medics. He leads the military new, one of a kind center for studying and combating heat injuries. The group says many other bases have seasons when they don't really see such injuries. Not Fort Benning though. Speaker 3: 00:58 The only week of the year where we won't have he casualty here is between Christmas and new year's. It's everybody's taking time off. Speaker 2: 01:04 Fort Benning has by far the most heat related injuries in the military. More than 1500 were reported between 2014 and 2018 the reasons are complicated. It's hot, it's humid and Benning's a big base where a lot of young soldiers do basic training. Benning also has been especially aggressive about identifying heat cases. Dr John Ambrose is an epidemiologist with a defense health agency who studies heat related illness. Speaker 3: 01:32 Fort Benning does a tremendous job of searching out those heat injuries and trying to find them so there may appear to be more heat injuries at places like Fort Benning, but it's because they're actively finding them as opposed to some of the other installations. Speaker 2: 01:45 Climate change and the record. Hot summers also may be driving some of the increase in heat injuries, but Ambrose said the most serious kinds of cases haven't become significantly more common. While milder cases are up sharply. That infers the increase may be driven not by an actual uptick in cases, but mainly by the military's increased focus on the problem. A few years ago, doctors at Bennings Martin army community hospital realized that the startling number of cases there was not just a huge problem but also an asset to fight that problem. Speaker 3: 02:18 No other facilities sees the volume and severity of heat related illnesses that we do here to be in a position to do clinically meaningful research. Speaker 2: 02:29 Dr Megan Gaylor was one of the two emergency room doctors here who proposed the heat center at Fort Benning. Speaker 3: 02:36 What we realized is that you know, any hospital that does anything, well your cancer centers or stroke centers, your pediatric centers, um, they do a lot of it and medicine as a profession then looks to those sort of centers. You sort of lead the way with regard to prevention and education, et cetera. Speaker 2: 02:52 She said that the medical staff on the base already had developed what's now called the Benning protocols to deal with heat related injuries from start to finish. One doctor got good results by piping the blood of patients with severe heat stroke through a cooling machine and all the ambulances on base were equipped to diagnose a potentially fatal condition called hyponatremia. When a soldier actually drinks too much water without enough salt, those patients could be killed by the aggressive hydration used to treat other heat injuries Speaker 3: 03:23 for so long, there's been this emphasis on hydration, hydration, drink water, drink water in the army. And the fact of the matter is you cannot drink your way out of a heat stroke, but you can drink your self to death from hyponatremia. So that message needs to shift. Speaker 2: 03:38 There may not be a way to greatly reduce the number of mild heat illness cases. Troops have to train in the conditions they may fight in, but Gaylor and DeGroote say the center has some straight forward goals. No more deaths, no more deaths, and addressed the misconceptions. And it has some lofty goals too, like becoming a research hub that advances medicine to benefit not only the military, but anyone who might fall victim to heat from construction workers to high school football players at Fort Benning. This is Jay price. Speaker 1: 04:12 This story was produced by the American Homefront project, a public media collaboration that reports on American military life and veterans funding comes from the corporation for public broadcasting. Speaker 4: 04:30 [inaudible].