In this month's issue of Wired, an article by Steve Silberman about Acinetobacter baumannii, a drug-resistant supergerm infecting the US military's evacuation chain:
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.
Behind the scenes, the spread of a pathogen that targets wounded GIs has triggered broad reforms in both combat medical care and the Pentagon's networks for tracking bacterial threats within the ranks. Interviews with current and former military physicians, recent articles in medical journals, and internal reports reveal that the Department of Defense has been waging a secret war within the larger mission in Iraq and Afghanistan – a war against antibiotic-resistant pathogens.
Link to "The Invisible Enemy in Iraq," which includes links to a number of supporting PDF documents. See also this sidebar for the article, "Requiem for the Magic Bullets," Link. Photo: Rick Wilking/Reuters/Corbis.
Reader comment: Eric says,
After reading your post regarding the Acinetobacter baumannii outbreak among US soldiers, I was reminded that up until very recently most military conflicts were hugely affected by disease. Half of all US casualties in world war 1 were from the flu, not the enemy. In the US Civil War, again about half of the deaths were due to disease. Link.
