Super glue has become a household item today, but do know super glue is used in the battlefield as well to deal with wounds of soldiers. The Army spire could be used by any soldier and aroused such confidence in possibilities that in 1966 the US Army sent Vietnam a team of trained health personnel in the use of super glue spray. The trained health personnel used the spray on the battlefield to stop bleeding during the evacuation of wounded.
Super glue was the last resort to prevent the wounded soldiers from losing their lives, so the US Army medical personnel did not use it extensively, but when it did, it was a success in most cases.
Chantelle Champagne, of the University of Alberta, analyzed available medical literature on the use of it. The super glue spray successfully stopped bleeding in all but four out of 30 well documented cases produced in the Vietnam War. In addition to these cases, there were many other examples of the use of super on the battlefield, which lacked the necessary documentation to carry out a medical study.
In the civilian context, however, the US Food and Drug Administration was skeptical of the safety of this chemical. In 1964, Eastman filed with the agency an application for approval of this new drug, not knowing that it would take 30 years of bureaucratic battle before being able to make its product available to the US surgeons.
The scientists at the US Food and Drug Administration applied huge amounts of super glue to rats, causing them tumors, and some of them malignant. Almost anything in huge quantities could trigger a tumor which Coover told the Chicago Tribune. The inventor considered the agency's tests not to represent the type of super glue used by his team, a small localized amount of super glue to stick paste tissues that would disappear from the body in about 14 days.
Since the US bureaucracy took too much care, Japan, Austria, Germany and Canada, among others, undertook their own clinical trials in the 1960s and 1970s. Japan approved super glue as tissue adhesives in 1963 followed by Germany in 1968. The US agency did not give in to the overwhelming results of research and international experience until 1998 when it finally classified super glue as a topical medical device.
It continues to be part of civil and military kits worldwide as a tissue adhesive. However, the hemostatic properties of super glue were so useful in Vietnam, they have lately been overshadowed by fast acting solutions using biologically neutral chitosan or chitin or kaolin as active ingredients.
But the Super Glue deserves all the credit that is due. Cooper's discovery and its multipurpose nature demonstrate how the military can generate innovation in the private sector. Without Kodak's involvement in the US war economy, the world would have run out of many models of airplanes and many unglued vases, not to mention that many more soldiers would have died in Vietnam. For more info, visit http://thereviewgurus.com/reviews/best-super-glue/.
