Much easier

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the American Heart Association has finally changed its guidelines on CPR; it's now okay to just do chest compressions without doing mouth-to-mouth. That'll make it a lot easier to do, and remove a lot of the 'gik' factor when rescuers approach someone lying on the street with unknown problems. (Hey, Rico loves his fellow man as much as the next guy, but if you drooling nasty stuff I'm not gonna do mouth-to-mouth, sorry, fuck you, you can die...)
The new guidelines, published in the journal Circulation, recognize that recent research has shown no real advantage to conventional mouth-to-mouth CPR in outside-the-hospital cardiac arrest cases. In addition, studies show that bystanders are often reluctant to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on strangers, but are more likely to try rapid chest compression. "We think that if we can double the number of bystanders who attempt CPR, we can save tens of thousands of lives every year," said Mary Fran Hazinski, a nurse at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and spokeswoman for the American Heart Association. The latest revision stems from three major studies published last year that showed no advantage in using mouth-to-mouth resuscitation in cardiac cases. At best, CPR is a desperate measure. Survival rates are highly dependent on prompt arrival of a defibrillator - the kind carried by ambulance crews and increasingly available in public venues such as airports and sports stadiums. "If you have access to an AED (Automated External Defibrillator), you want to apply that as early as possible," advised San Francisco General's Barton. "Early defibrillation is the most successful intervention you can do."