Disaster medicine and wartorn former Yugoslavia.

Abbreviations: EMS = emergency medical services; IRRC = International Resuscitation Research Center; LSFA = life-supporting first-aid; WADEM = World Association for Disaster and Emergency Medicine Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, with a pre-war population of 550,000, has been under siege since April 1992. So far, more than 10,000 people in the city have been killed (including 1,500 children), and more than 50,000 people have been wounded (including 15,000 younger than age 18 years).' Sarajevo's largest hospital, the Kosevo University Hospital (with approximately 2,000 beds), has been shelled systematically and hit more than 200 times. Fifteen staff members have been killed inside the hospital's complex. Physicians from the State Hospital of Sarajevo (with about 200 beds) report on the emergency care of civilians in wartorn Sarajevo in the special supplement to this issue of I'rehospital and Disaster Medicine. They have done this as objectively as possible under the unbearable circumstances of the siege, considering that attempts to save one's own and others' lives has priority over data recording.