The Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery has retracted a letter it published about a purportedly novel injury observed during the two deadly waves of pager explosions in Lebanon and Syria in 2024, reportedly linked to Israeli intelligence services.
The original letter, “‘Pager’s trauma’ as a new and destructive type of blast injuries,” published Dec. 26, 2024, had not been indexed by Clarivate’s Web of Science. It focused on the September 2024 attacks in Lebanon and Syria, which led to dozens of deaths and thousands of injuries among Hezbollah fighters and some civilians. The attacks were carried out by boobytrapping walkie-talkies and pagers with explosives and are widely believed to have been carried at the direction of Israeli authorities.
The new letter argued such injuries are novel, dubbing them “Pager’s trauma.”
The letter read:
It is necessary for international organizations to deal seriously with individuals, groups, and governments responsible for these terrible terrorist acts.
It added:
Iran can play a central role in the field of prevention, treatment, and rehabilitation of victims of such attacks in the region and even the world.
According to the retraction notice, issued by the journal’s editors and publisher February 10, a review conducted by senior editorial board members of the journal identified “significant issues” leading the journal to conclude that the findings are unreliable and not supported by scientific data.
Study coauthor Fathollah Ahmadpour, who works at the Trauma Research Center at the Baqiyatallah University of Medical Sciences in Tehran, did not respond to our request for comment. We also received no response from the journal’s editor-in-chief, Raul Coimbra, surgeon-in-chief of the Riverside University Health System Medical Center in California.
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Brave of Retraction Watch to leave comments open on this post.
What’s the “reportedly linked” and “widely believed” language about? Netanyahu has been happy to take responsibility, up to giving out plated pagers as trophies.
What a significant issue? Strange. It is definitely about new type of trauma. Of course it would be better to have statistics of variants etc. But the incompletness is not the reason to retract – if it was decision to publish.
Another example of politics trying to corrupt science. There is absolutely nothing new about these types of injuries. They are caused by a small amount of explosives going off in close proximity to the body. These types of injuries occur in war all the time due to boobytraps and mines.