Chest compressions, not mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, save lives

A new study fom the Lancet[V.369, Iss.9565.17/3/07 pp882-884]: Forget mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. When somebody collapses in cardiac arrest, experts now say, bystanders should not bother breathing into his or her mouth, once considered a key component of cardiopulmonary resuscitation. "Rescue breathing is an oxymoron," says Gordon Ewy of the University of Arizona College of Medicine. "We've been doing it wrong for 40 years."
The landmark study, by Ken Nagao and colleagues at Surugadai Nihon University Hospital in Tokyo, found that twice as many of 4,241 cardiac-arrest victims who collapsed in front of others survived with good brain function if they got compressions only without mouth-to-mouth breathing. The study, the largest of its kind, appears in British medical journal The Lancet