I was reading about some burn victims from summer fires in Greece, and some succumbed to their burns more than 3 months after they were originally exposed to the flames. Shouldn’t they be in the clear at that point given burn wounds heal over time?
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In a simple sense, if you have an apple, and you cut it in half, the exposed area will become “brown” after a while. A normal cut on the apple will turn a small part of it brown, and you can just cut it off. However if you peel a large amount of the apples skin, suddenly you get large brown parts, maybe even some ants and flies found the apple and will start eating it.
In a more in-depth explanation, burn wounds have a couple of problems that can kill. One of the most dangerous parts is infections, which can take a lot of time. When talking about burn victims, you are talking about someone that got burned on a large % of his body. When burned your body will lose its outside layer of protection, the skin in a large surface area(think of when you lightly burn your finger, and later the skin falls off), this makes you very susceptible to infections, since you don’t have the outside layer of skin to protect you, so any “dirt” in the air can infect you. In addition to that the body loses a lot of its ability to fight infections, such as sweating to control body heat, and is weak from fighting the large wound, and will usually be dehydrated(another dangerous part of large burn wounds). Now skin takes a lot of time to heal, especially such a large amount, and in addition to that, once you have infections it can make the process problematic, and longer. Hospitals will try to fight the infection any way they know how to, and that way victims can sometimes take months until they die, or in a better outcome, beat the infection and survive.
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