Which consequence of the Iraq war is threatening your life today, as we speak? A new, Super-resistant bacteria, coming out of US military hospitals in Iraq and Europe:
A homemade bomb exploded under a Humvee in Anbar province, Iraq, on August 21, 2004. The blast flipped the vehicle into the air, killing two US marines and wounding another – a soft-spoken 20-year-old named Jonathan Gadsden who was near the end of his second tour of duty. … His skull and ribs were fractured, his neck was broken, his back was badly burned, and his stomach had been perforated by shrapnel and debris.
Gadsden got out of the war zone alive because of the Department of Defense’s network of frontline trauma care and rapid air transport known as the evacuation chain. … He was airlifted to the 31st Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad, located in an old health care facility called the Ibn Sina, which had formerly catered to the Baathist elite. Army surgeons there repaired Gadsden’s cranium, removed his injured spleen, and pumped him full of broad-spectrum antibiotics to ward off infection.
Three days later, he was flown to the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, the largest American military hospital in Europe. He was treated for his burns, and his spine was stabilized for the 18-hour flight to the US. Just a week after nearly dying in the desert, Gadsden was recuperating at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, with his mother, Zeada, at his bedside. […]
But he still had mysterious symptoms that he couldn’t shake, like headaches, rashes, and intermittent fevers. His doctors gave him CT scans, laxatives, methadone, beta-blockers, Xanax, more surgery, and more antibiotics. An accurate evaluation of his case was difficult, however, because portions of his medical records never arrived from Bethesda. If they had, they would have shown a positive test for a kind of bacteria called Acinetobacter baumannii.
In the taxonomy of bad bugs, acinetobacter is classified as an opportunistic pathogen. Healthy people can carry the bacteria on their skin with no ill effects – a process known as colonization. But in newborns, the elderly, burn victims, patients with depressed immune systems, and those on ventilators, acinetobacter infections can kill. The removal of Gadsden’s spleen and the traumatic nature of his wounds made him a prime target. […]
Since OPERATION Iraqi Freedom began in 2003, more than 700 US soldiers have been infected or colonized with Acinetobacter baumannii. A significant number of additional cases have been found in the Canadian and British armed forces, and among wounded Iraqi civilians. The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology has recorded seven deaths caused by the bacteria in US hospitals along the evacuation chain. Four were unlucky civilians who picked up the bug at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC, while undergoing treatment for other life-threatening conditions. Another was a 63-year-old woman, also chronically ill, who shared a ward at Landstuhl with infected coalition troops. […]
In Europe, multidrug-resistant acinetobacter is spreading through civilian hospitals, precipitating a public health crisis. A 2003-2004 epidemic hit more than 50 hospitals and long-term care facilities in France, making scores of patients sick and killing 34 people. Thirty-nine infected patients died at St. Mary’s Hospital in London two years ago. […]
In the summer of 2003, civilian patients started getting sick at the Saarland University Hospital, one of the German facilities that admitted US troops evacuated from Iraq. A few months later, an elderly woman being treated for chronic lung disease at Landstuhl died suddenly of antibiotic-resistant acinetobacter pneumonia and bacteremia. DOD investigators found a perfect genetic match between the bug that caused her death and one infecting a military patient down the hall. Eventually, more than 30 civilian patients picked up acinetobacter infections at Walter Reed.
The bacteria was spreading beyond the theater of war. […]
Read the whole article. It describes in chilling detail the scope of this threat to Iraqi, US and European populations. We are looking at the evolution of “superbugs” that has been hastened by the military’s treatment of wounded soldiers in Iraq. All just another unexpected benefit brought to us by the our Dear Leader’s Central Front in the War on Terror.
