Taking a break from the All Hackett All the Time coverage for I while, I went off to visit some other sites. At
Soldiers for the Truth they had a blurb about a drug resistant infection afflicting our troops in Iraq. It linked to a story from Forbes.com,
The Iraq Infection.
More below....
The Iraq Infection
Matthew Herper, 08.02.05, 6:00 AM ET
NEW YORK - Military doctors are fighting to contain an outbreak of a potentially deadly drug-resistant bacteria that apparently originated in the Iraqi soil. So far at least 280 people, mostly soldiers returning from the battlefield, have been infected, a number of whom contracted the illness while in U.S. military hospitals.
Most of the victims are relatively young troops who were injured by the land mines, mortars and suicide bombs that have permeated the Iraq conflict. No active-duty soldiers have died from the infections, but five extremely sick patients who were in the same hospitals as the injured soldiers have died after being infected with the bacteria, Acinetobacter baumannii.
"This a very large outbreak," says Arjun Srinivasan, a lieutenant commander in the U.S. public health service and a medical epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control.
Acinetobacter was a common infection for grunts in Vietnam as well. People can carry the bacteria on their skin without symptoms, but this strain seems to be resistant to most antibiotics, but fortunately not all of them.
One of those infected in Iraq was Marine Cpl. Sean Locker. On July 10, he was attacked by a suicide bomber in a car while guarding a convoy. Shrapnel hit him in his nose, his right index finger and his right eye, blinding him. His left lung collapsed. But the worst damage was done to his left arm. It was amputated, and Locker says he knew it would be as soon as he looked down at it. "I tried to stay level-headed," he says.
Locker, 25, was flown to an army base in Landstuhl, Germany, and then to NNMC in Bethesda. There, doctors found that what was left of his arm after the amputation had been infected with Acinetobacter. For Locker, the prognosis was good, as two years of hard experience treating patients who had returned from war had taught doctors how to deal with the infection - and to prevent it from spreading to sicker patients. Using imipenem, one of three intravenous antibiotics effective against Acinetobacter, doctors are treating Locker's infection. He hopes to go home soon and buy a new truck.
But other patients have been less fortunate, as they have suffered from infections of the bone, the bloodstream or of internal organs, which have complicated their care. Lt. Cmdr. Petersen says that NNMC's annual bill for the kind of antibiotics Locker received has increased tenfold to $200,000.
Besides imipenem, which carries a risk of seizure, two other drugs have worked. Another is amikacin, which does not work for bone infections and has not been effective against some strains of the bacteria. A third is colistin, an antibiotic doctors had stopped using because of its toxic effects on the kidneys.
"It is a scary thing about any drug-resistant bacteria, when you grow it for the very first time out of a patient and you've only got three antibiotics, one so old that we had to bring it back from the archives," says Col. Joel Fishbain, chairman of the infection-control committee at Walter Reed.
We need to get the fuck out of Iraq. Now!