Friday, January 26, 2007

Acinetobacter baumannii



Another new bug. Wonder how long it'll be before we start seeing this in the general population of hospitals outside the military system.
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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have been following this bug since my husband brought it back from Iraq via the evacuation route.
It's already spread to community hospitals all over the country.
Most of the reports I am getting are from family members of patients who either saw a soldier in the hospital or their doctors actually told them it was the strain from Iraq.
One wounded soldier was home from Walter Reed for a break. He gets sick with a high tempurature and goes to a hospital in the Phoenix area. Then there is the outbreak in the Phoenix Valley area.
I am so angry that our soldiers have had to loose further life and limb due to this.
I am further enraged that the DOD put more effort into covering this up than they did into containing it.

January 27, 2007 at 6:50 AM
MauserMedic said...

I hope your husband has had a full recovery from his injuries. I was deployed with the 109th Med Bn in 03-04 in North and Central Iraq. We were an Area Support Med Bn, and usually ended up on posts that had a CSH on them. This article is the first I have heard of this bacteria, and I worked with over 10 doctors directly during my deployment. I think there was a definite lack of communication and information at the time. Conditions were primitive at best, and wound care was less than optimal. I think a large part of the slow response to this is that the military is a huge bureaucracy with slow response time, poor coordination, and a long held tendency to minimize personal risk to one's career by not rocking the boat. I don't see much chance of that changing in the future, but I do hope that now that the problem is apparent, needed measures will be taken to correct this.

Best wishes to you and your husband; hope the stuff is out of his system and he's up and about his business.

-Jim (M/Medic)

January 28, 2007 at 8:32 PM

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