X-Message-Number: 22353
Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2003 11:29:19 -0400
From: david shumaker <>
Subject: SA announces its Standby Based Transport service

SUSPENDED ANIMATION ANNOUNCES NATIONWIDE ITS PREMIUM STANDBY BASED
TRANSPORT SERVICE


Suspended Animation, Inc. has announced that effective immediately it is
available to provide advanced professional Standby Based Transport (SBT)
to cryonicists signed up with ACS, Alcor or CI from anywhere in the
United States. For information regarding the details of this service
see:

http://www.suspended.org/news/SBT/SA_announces_advanced_SBT.html


Ischemic damage is a major threat to patient resuscitation since it may
endanger the very fabric of memory in the brain. Irrespective of the
amount of cryopreservation damage done to the patient, if ischemia has
already destroyed memory before the patient is cryopreserved, there may
be little nano-technology or other future medicine can do to recover it.
The goal of SA's SBT is to deliver into the cryosuspension process a
patient whose total unmitigated normothermic ischemia time has been held
to only a few minutes, and whose overall unmitigated pre-suspension cold
ischemia time has been kept to only a few hours. 

SA uses a paid professional SBT team consisting of a Ph.D. Cellular
Pharmacologist; a surgically skilled Paramedic; a team leader with
experience on numerous standby, transport, and recovery activities; and
other experienced personnel. All team members have actual recent
transport experience and have trained together as a unit. The team is
dispatched from SA's headquarters in Boca Raton, FL by aircraft or local
transportation as appropriate and remains with the patient until needed
or the crisis is otherwise resolved. 

With the team comes SA's air transportable patient support system, the
most advanced and complete patient treatment system in the cryonics
community. The system consists of SA's portable ice bath; with
respiration integrated thumper for optimum cardio-pulmonary support; an
advanced anti-ischemia and blood stabilizing pharmacological package;
SA's bypass washout, cooldown and perfusion system with its integrated
temperature, pressure, and flow monitoring equipment and a heat
exchanger/ECMO for cooling and oxygenating blood and washout fluid; a
large volume of MHP washout fluid and where appropriate glycerol based
cryoprotectant; plus surgical and support kits for all contingencies. 

The team acts immediately upon patient pronouncement to administer
anti-ischemia medications, apply cardio-pulmonary support (CPS) and
initiate external cooling. Normally, medication and CPS are initiated
within seconds of pronouncement with cooling beginning within a couple
of minutes.  The patient is then quickly transferred to the closest
local site suitable for surgery to initiate blood washout with
oxygenated and chilled MHP washout fluid, followed by further closed
cycle oxygenated cooldown. Once the patient is washed out and cooled to
just above freezing, they are either transported by air ambulance for
vitrification or freezing or are immediately perfused with glycerol for
dry ice freezing on the way to a custodial facility. In any case,
beginning seconds after death the patient is medicated, kept oxygenated,
is cooled to just above freezing, may or may not be cryoprotected, and
is transported by air ambulance. (Note that this is a nominal
description of the process and each case may vary to some degree from
the norm.)  

SA reminds all cryonicists that SA does not store cryonics patients and
persons contemplating using SA for SBT must contract with Alcor or CI
(or via ACS with one of the above companies) for long term custodial
care.

SA believes ischemic time is the greatest single enemy of successful
cryopreservation and professional SBT is the best current means of
mitigating it.

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