X-Message-Number: 9029
Date: Mon, 19 Jan 1998 13:29:11 -0500 (EST)
From: Ben Best <>
Subject: Toronto Cryonics Emergency Response Training a success!

    11 people (not including the Instructor, me) attended the 
Cryonics Emergency Response Training in Toronto, Canada on Sunday,
January 18th. I was frankly quite surprised that the interest
in attending this course was as great as it was -- greater
than the interest has been in attending our local dinners,
recently. 3 people made the 5-hour drive from Ottawa.

    There was 1 Alcor member, 1 Cryonics Instuitute member and 1 CryoCare
member (not including the Instructor, who is also with CryoCare). 
Ironically, the ACS member who had proposed the course in the first place,
did not attend. The CI member had previously attended the Alcor Transport
Training course, but he was not in the least disappointed with the amount
of information available to be learned in this course.

    One man was a chemical engineer who had discovered the course on the
Cryonics Society of Canada Website (http://www.benbest.com/cryocdn.html).
He attended the course with his two children, one of whom is doing a 
cryobiology science project for school -- freezing amoeba in glycerol
and freezing unicellular plant organisms in sorbitol.

    The first half of the course dealt with CPR, which I believe very
much complements cryonics emergency response. I included discussion
of ischemia & shock -- topics which I could readily segue into the 
cryonics portion of the course. I also discussed the survival rates
in a critical Belgian study (15% with chest-compressions, 16% with
chest-compressions plus mouth-to-mouth and 6% with no CPR) and made
some comparisons with anticipated "survival" with good & poor local
response.

    The cryonics portion dealt with patient location, dealing with family,
morticians & medical personnel, means of effective cooldown, equipment for
patient stabilization, APACHE II, the purpose of administering meds,
bracelet/necktag information, etc. More details will appear in the
Winter 1998 issue of CANADIAN CRYONICS NEWS.
    
         --------------------------------------------
            Ben Best ()
            http://www.benbest.com/

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