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AN EXPLOSION RIPS through a chemical weapons depot. Bleeding victims stumble out of the building and scream for help.
Six inspectors from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) have just arrived at the scene and hit the ground.
Was it an attack or an accident that tore through the building and shattered the calm of the foggy countryside? What are the immediate threats? What to do?
With real-life scenarios such as this one, as well as simulated combat and hostage situations, the German military is training chemical weapons inspectors headed into Syria.
“If you venture into places like this, you should forget Hollywood,” said Colonel Reinhard Barz, head of the German military’s UN Training Centre in Wildflecken, Bavaria.
UN vehicles in Syria (AP Photo)
Most people only know such situations from war movies or media reports and, if headed there, need realistic hostile environment “awareness training”, said Barz.
This is especially true for Syria, “certainly one of the hottest patches we have right now”, he said.
The inspectors will have to cross territory controlled by different armed factions, may come under fire and face explosives attacks, “and they must realise that they could be wounded,” said the colonel.
The conflict in Syria has claimed more than 100,000 lives in two and half years.
Many members of a new batch of 24 inspectors of the OPCW, the body that won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, are headed straight to one of the world’s worst frontlines, some as early as this week.
To prepare them for the dangers that await, OPCW arms specialists, chemical weapons experts and translators from 17 countries joined the training course last week at the German Bundeswehr’s United Nations Training Centre.
Inspectors sent into ‘middle of ongoing conflict’
“All of our inspectors have to go through this course,” said Franz Ontal, head of inspector training at The Hague-based OPCW, who called the time in Germany “very rewarding”.
Ontal said that, despite the organisation’s long-standing expertise with chemical weapons, “the difference now is that we are active in the middle of an ongoing conflict”.
The mission resulted from a US-Russian agreement after the United States threatened the Damascus regime with punitive strikes over a deadly August 21 chemical attack attributed to the forces of President Bashar al-Assad, who has denied culpability.
About 60 experts and other staff of the UN and the OPCW have been engaged in Syria since October 1, with their numbers set to be boosted to up to 100.
The Bundeswehr centre every year trains some 12,000 soldiers and police, UN staff, employees of various organisations that operate in dangerous areas, including from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and participants in European Union missions.
The job ahead
Ontal said he was happy with how the inspectors, who were wearing helmets and flak jackets for the exercise, reacted to the explosion scenario.
“They immediately recognised that it was an accident in the chemical weapons storage facility and not a hostile situation,” he said.
The inspectors gave first aid, applied bandages and took the wounded to safety.
“They reacted exactly as they were supposed to,” said Ontal.
The goal of the Syria mission under a UN resolution is to make Syria’s chemical weapons production facilities unusable by November 1 and to catalogue and destroy the regime’s chemical weapons arsenal by June 30.
It’s a tight timeframe, said Ontal, a US citizen who is also headed for Syria.
“Even in a country at peace, such a mission would usually take years,” he said.
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Great app. Irene Walsh was brilliant at the launch of the iPad Pro. Really stood out. Super Irish success story!
Outstanding.
Meanwhile there’s another Irish anatomy app company that’s been collecting prizes and positive reviews for its products aimed at students and practitioners pocketanatomy
There’s no question that this looks brilliant, it can certainly impart a level of detail I’ve only seen on TV but is it viable? Despite the presentation who exactly is this product aimed at, if it were just aimed at the medical field you’d imagine it wouldn’t be available to the general public, yet it’s available to everyone. You’re left with the impression that, while they’d like the medical profession to use it, and market it to this profession, in reality it’s a rather clever marketing ploy to attract the general public to use this product, believing it to be what doctors use.
I attend quite a lot of doctors and hospitals and have yet to see one with an iPad in their surgery, many have an iPhone as a personal phone and of course a desktop computer is essential but not an iPad. I also know there are dedicated products out there from several medical companies, wireless tablet devices some running proprietary software which are able to link with other patient monitoring devices wirelessly. This would mean a patient in a clinic or hospital setting would have all their details wirelessly transmitted from one area to another, transparently, if any of their vital signs began to change as they travelled through the facility this would automatically be detected, alarms raised and staff notified. It would be a little like having everyone monitored all the time as if they were in an ICU.
I’d be particularly alarmed if I went to a consultant cardiologist and he pulled out an iPad to see how the heart worked.
The article alludes to medical students being core customers.
It’s for med students, physio students etc.
Or maybe she pulls it out to so you how “the heart works”. Believe it or not the general public often are to sure of the main arteries of the heart.
In Irene Walsh’s presentation above she began by saying that the average doctors consultation lasts only 7 minutes and their patient retains only 14% of the information received. This then led her into demonstrating the use of the software and its benefits with the new iPad Pro, with a few strategically placed Apple Watches too, where she said if she were a doctor she could discuss clinical issues with a patients knee, for example.
At one point in the demonstration, while using the new pencil tool, she said if she were a Medical Student she could use it to accurately cut through the models layers and simulate surgical procedures. She went on to say that as a physician if a patient presented with another knee injury she could use the pencil tool again to demonstrate to them exactly what is happening, including if they happened to have varying levels of arthritis.
She also clearly stated that she could record all this and share it with the patient for them to view with the software on their own iPad. This implicitly assumes both patient and doctor must be using the same software, and of course must also have an iPad.
Indeed she did Sharky. The Apple keynote speech is not an indication of the target market. It is an exploration of possible markets.
They could widen their audience and usp by making sure that everything can be downloaded as stl/obj/ply for 3D printing too.
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