TASER Electronic Control Devices Review Of Safety Literature

4. The patient loses consciousness within 5-15 seconds.
5. A sufficiently strong defibrillation shock—either internal or external—
restores a cardiac sinus rhythm 99.9% of the time. 25
6. There is no increased risk of a later VF since electrical current does not
linger, or build up, in the body as a poison or drug might.
These scientific findings sometimes appear to be appreciated by only a few media
reporters. The majority of medical examiners do understand these facts as
can be seen from the increasing sophistication of autopsies in media misreported
cases.
2.2 No Single TASER ECD Pulse Can Induce VF
The TASER ECD cannot induce VF. 27 The battery powered hand-held TASER
ECD has very brief duration high currents and just like a strong static electricity
shock, the very brief electrical pulses are significantly too short in duration and
low in net current to affect the heart as described above.
Different Duration Definitions
The term “duration” is used in the study of electrophysiology with 2 very different
scales.
1. Pulse duration. This is the width of an individual electrical pulse and is
typically 1 ms or even far less. For example the pulse duration of an X26
ECD is about 0.1 ms or 100 µs. This duration is on the scale that a nerve
cell requires to be stimulated.
2. Shock or application duration. This refers to the total length of time that an
electrical current is applied on the order of time that a human could estimate
it. This is typically 1 second or more. For example, the programmed
X26 application duration is 5 seconds. During that time it will deliver 95 (=
19 pps x 5 seconds) of the short duration pulses.
Cardiac Rhythm Safety Margin Calculations
As of July 2008, TASER devices were used in over 750,000 voluntary training
exposures and 600,000 field uses (total of about 1.4 million human uses). There
is no credible evidence of a resulting cardiac arrhythmia as there have been no
well-documented cases of onset of VF within 10 seconds of the application. 28
The safety margin of the TASER device outputs can be quantified by comparing
them to published scientific data on the electrical induction of VF (the main cause
of cardiac arrest).
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