Prosthetics

For months, U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Luis Falcon patrolled the downtrodden neighborhoods of Baqubah, where Sunni Muslim extremists had tried to create an Islamic caliphate. One day, he came upon a young girl sitting in an old, oversized wheelchair, blood crusted on the stumps where her legs had been. Her name was Shahad Abbas Aziz, and on Friday, the 12-year-old sat patiently in a clinic in Baghdad's Green Zone while doctors measured what remains of her legs.

Army Staff Sgt. Travis Strong, whose legs were blown off above the knee by a roadside bomb in Baghdad, was trying a few steps on his new, man-made pair, constructed out of aluminum and carbon fiber. Using his muscular arms and steely determination, he steadied himself on the parallel bars as he walked gingerly along the mat at Naval Medical Center San Diego. "If I stand straight, this leg is good," said Strong, nodding to his left, "but the other leg buckles."

The waiting room in William Yule's office is full by the time he arrives each morning. Throughout the day, Yule sees dozens of patients, bouncing between four sparsely decorated examining rooms on such a tight schedule that he often has no time for lunch. But Yule is no doctor. He's a prosthetist who fits limbs on recent amputees, and business is booming for one reason: diabetes. "There's no such thing as a slow day," says Yule, of Hanger Prosthetics & Orthotics Inc.

With sleek, curved prosthetic legs that appear straight out of a sci-fi movie, sprinter Oscar Pistorius has been blazing across running tracks, leaving controversy in his wake. At issue is whether those carbon graphite appendages give the 20-year-old South African bilateral amputee an advantage over able-bodied runners, an issue that's yet to be determined as he makes a bid for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. No, say prosthetic manufacturers, other amputee athletes and researchers.

A Long Beach man was indicted Friday on suspicion of stealing three endangered iguanas from a nature preserve in Fiji and smuggling them into the United States in his prosthetic leg. Jereme James, 33, faces a single count of smuggling, according to a federal indictment. The charge carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison. Prosecutors allege that James stole the Fiji Island banded iguanas while visiting the South Pacific island in September 2002. He then brought the reptiles to the U.S.

Patients with lung disease have few options. Machines that oxygenate the blood during heart and lung surgery -- and pump it through the body -- have been saving lives for 50 years, but the devices are big, clunky and require the presence of a specialist, making them inappropriate for patients not undergoing such surgery. Partly as a result, nearly 342,000 Americans die of lung disease each year.

People with chronic kidney failure face a bleak future. Conventional dialysis cleanses the blood of only about 17% of the toxic chemicals that a healthy kidney removes. And donor organs are scarce. The 300,000 Americans who depend on dialysis to stay alive are crippled by an array of complications caused by the buildup of dangerous poisons in their blood, and only one-third survive more than five years. Experimental devices in development could help turn this situation around.

It was four years ago, but Katie Holloway can't forget. The college coach, on a recruitment trip to Lake Stevens High in Washington state, proclaimed the highly ranked senior as the missing piece to her women's basketball program. She invited Holloway for an official visit -- a scholarship as part of the deal. Holloway remembers shifting in her chair at that moment, knowing she was about to reveal what she had staunchly kept concealed for so long. She wears a prosthetic lower right leg.

In the history of war, the more proficient combatants have become at fighting, the better medicine has become at healing. During World War II, battlefield doctors devised better techniques to repair delicate blood vessels, essentially rewriting the textbooks on vascular surgery. The Vietnam War sparked swift helicopter evacuation of the wounded that was soon copied by urban medical centers throughout the United States.

Beyond the wounded in Afghanistan and Iraq, some of the other 1.28 million U.S. citizens who are amputees could also benefit from newer high-tech prostheses, health and insurance experts say. But they might not get them.