The hidden epidemic?
Updated on 13 February 2006
Exclusive: A remarkable insight into the Californian facility that is trying to cope with America's 800 brain damaged veterans of the Iraq war:
>>Watch the report
There are two fronts in the war on terror: Afghanistan and Iraq - and both are taking their toll on the Americans, who today lost four soldiers in a bomb attack in the Afghan province of Uruzgan.
In Iraq, rapid advances in body armour and battlefield medicine mean soldiers are more likely to stay alive than in any previous American war. But the hidden cost of this survival is a 'brain injury epidemic' - according to army doctors.
More than 16,000 American soldiers have been wounded in Iraq. Seventeen hundred could be brain damaged, according to one report.
But unofficial estimates put this figure as high as nearly 7000 with only 800 of them treated at specialist brain injury units.
Potentially thousands of troops are still undiagnosed. Our Washington Correspondent Jonathan Rugman was given rare access to a specialist military brain injury unit in Palo Alto, California - from where he sent this report.
