SOCHI. Oct 3 (Interfax-AVN) - Unrecoverable losses among sick and wounded servicemen of the Combined Federal Forces during the second Chechnya campaign amounted to 0.8 percent, Viktor Ozerov, defense and security committee chairman in the Federation Council upper house of Russian parliament, said on Friday.
"According to available data, 95 percent of sick and wounded servicemen have been returned to ranks since the beginning on the second Chechnya campaign, while unrecoverable losses have amounted to 0.8 percent," Ozerov told a session of the coordination council on servicemen's social security in Sochi.
"The figure confirms advanced professional skills of our military doctors, because unrecoverable losses in other military conflicts of the global contemporary history are much higher," he said.
"There are other positive examples.No outbreaks of infectious diseases have been registered in the troops at war during the anti-terrorist operation, and viral hepatitis A incidence has been halved," the senator went on.
According to him, medical aid has been provided to over 36,000 wounded people since August 1999, when federal troops entered Chechnya. Over 90 percent of wounded with combat surgical pathology have been returned to ranks. Artificial limbs were made for 285 servicemen, i.e. all those who needed them.
"It is high time to improve the comprehensive rehabilitation system for selected categories of servicemen, including participants in combat operations, flight personnel and submariners," Ozerov said.
"Thousands of servicemen have become disabled in numerous trouble spots of the past few years, especially in the two Chechnya campaigns. They are guaranteed free artificial limbs, but the quality of these limbs is extremely low. One cannot live a full life with them. The result is a high number of suicides among local war invalids," he said.
"Nevertheless, we have examples of skilled arrangement of servicemen's treatment and rehabilitation. We have seen one of them with our own eyes at the Defense Ministry's Voroshilov Military Sanatorium today," the lawmaker stressed.