The Iraq Infection (and it is spreading)

[leftchick]

http://www.forbes.com/home/sciencesandmedicine/2005/08/02/iraq-war-infection-bacteria-cx_mh_0802iraqinfect.html

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.


<snip>

Doctors worry not only about soldiers who are already infected but also those who are carrying Acinetobacter on their skin even though they themselves are not infected. Lt. Cmdr. Kyle Petersen, an infectious disease specialist at National Naval Medical Center (NNMC) in Bethesda, Md.,says his hospital treated 396 patients who had been wounded in Iraq between May 2003 and February 2005. About 10% were infected and another 20% were found to have Acinetobacter bacteria on their skin but were not infected. The rate of appearance of the bacteria has "been flat-out steady," says Petersen.

[ixion]

1. too late... already introduced into the ecosystem

Two years later with military personnel all over the US, I'm sure it's already working it's way through the system.

Way to go, BushCo. :grr:

[Dhalgren]

2. Man! This is the war that just keeps giving! What fucking next?

[Changenow]

3. The flu. nt

[tblue37]

4. Well,

how about leishmaniasis?

It is spread by sand flies. Usually it causes skin lesions and when it stays on the skin it usually can be treated successfully. But sometimes it is resistant to treatment, and sometimes it goes "underground" to attack internal organs, but without clear symptoms at first.

If it attacks major organs, it can be fatal. And sometimes, if it has gone undetected like that, evidence of the infection doesn't show up for months, giving it plenty of time to wreak havoc on the soldiers major organs.

I suspect that we will start hearing leishmaniasis stories eventually from returning troops.

http://www.biosci.ohio-state.edu/~parasite/leishmania.html
Members of the genus Leishmania infect many vertebrates, including humans, dogs, and rodents. The life cycles of members of the genus involve a vertebrate host (e.g., the human) and a vector (a sand fly) that transmits the parasite between vertebrate hosts. In the vector the parasite takes on a characteristic morphological form known as the promastigote (see below), and it reproduces asexually in the vector's gut. When the vector bites the vertebrate host, promastigotes are injected into the vertebrate host. The promastigotes enter cells of the vertebrate host and change into a form called the amastigote (see below). The amastigote reproduces in the host's cells, and when the cell eventually dies the amastigotes are released and infect other cells (view a diagram of the life cycle). The symptoms and pathology associated with leishmaniasis result from the amastigotes killing the host's cells.

There are many different "diseases" caused by Leishmania. In some diseases the amastigotes do not spread beyond the site of the vector's bite. This results in a "cutaneous leishmaniasis" (oriental sore, Jericho boil, Aleppo boil, or Dehli boil) that often heals spontaneously (view geographic distribution). In other instances the amastigotes may spread to the visceral organs (liver, spleen), resulting in "visceral leishmaniasis" (kala-azar or Dum-Dum fever) (view geographic distribution) or to the mucous membranes of the mouth and nose, resulting in "mucocutaneous leishmaniasis" (espundia or uta). Left untreated, these latter diseases result in high rates of mortality. The various types of leishmaniasis are confined primarily, but not exclusively, to Central and South America, central Africa, and parts of southern and central Asia.

[JohnyCanuck]

6. Probably deformed babies, cancer and possibly even murder

DEPLETED URANIUMA Scientific Perspective

An Interview With
LEUREN MORET, Geoscientist

Interview Conducted
By W. Leon Smith
and Nathan Diebenow

<snip>

ICONOCLAST: Does exposure to depleted uranium effect their psychological background when they come home?

MORET: Depleted uranium are these particles that form at very high temperatures. They are uranium oxides that are insoluble. They are at least 100 times smaller than a white blood cell, so when the soldiers breathe, they inhale them. The particles go through the nose, go through the olfactory and into the brain, and it messes up their cognitive abilities, thought processes.
It damages their mood-control mechanism in the brain. Four soldiers at Fort Bragg came back from Afghanistan, and within two months, those four had murdered their wives. This is part of the damage to the brain from the radiation and the particles.
The soldiers from Gulf War I in a group of 67 soldiers who came back, they had DU in their equipment, in their clothes, in their bodies, in their semen, and they had normal babies before they went over there to war. They came back, and the VA did a study. Of 251 Gulf War I veterans in Mississippi, in 67 percent of them, their babies born after the war were deemed to have severe birth defects. They had brains missing, arms and legs missing, organs missing. They were born without eyes. They had horrible blood diseases. It’s horrific.
If you want to look at something, Life magazine did a photo essay which is still on the Internet. It’s called “The Tiny Victims of Desert Storm.” You should look at that — oh, my God, the post-Gulf War babies playing with their brothers and sisters who are normal.
Basically, it’s like smoking crack, only you’re smoking radioactive crack. It goes straight into the blood stream. It’s carried all throughout the body into the bones, the bone marrow, the brain. It goes into the fetus. It’s a systemic poison and a radiological poison.

http://www.iconoclast-texas.com/News/2005/11-20/19news03.htm

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=4124449

[Ian David]

5. ACINETOBACTER

ACINETOBACTER

Acinetobacter species are oxidase-negative, non-motile bacteria which appear as Gram-negative coccobacilli in pairs under the microscope. Identifying the different species of this genus can be done through the use of FLN (Flourescence-Lactose-Denitrification medium) acid results which determines the amount of acid produced from metabolizing glucose. Also, most members of Acinetobacter show good growth on MacConkey agar with the exception of some A. lwoffii strains. Although many species of Acinetobacter can cause infection, A. baumannii is the most frequently encountered species in the clinical laboratory. Like Pseudomonas, A. baumannii can be linked to many hospital acquired infections including skin and wound infections, pneumonia, and meningitis. A. lwoffi, in particular, is responsible for most cases of meningitis caused by Acinetobacter. Because most species are resistant to penicillin and chloramphenicol, a combination of aminoglycoside and ticarcillin is usually recommended for treatment.

* LABORATORY INDICATIONS: Oxidase -
* Non-motile
* Penicillin resistance (most strains)

More:
http://medic.med.uth.tmc.edu/path/00001488.htm

[peacetalksforall]

7. This is the first time I've thought about the end of this planet on my own

without prompting by reading a comment or article.

Why? Because Iraq is the land referred to as the Cradle of Civilization. Then, we had to invade it. Imperialists from the West.

More importantly, I can't get my mind to drop vague tidbits that have appeared in the last few years -

I remember reading that -

. one of the reasons we HAD to go back into Iraq was to take care of something that was sold? to Hussein and was buried there

. some of our soldiers (early on after Mission Accomplished) were tasked with moving some materials and they became mysteriously sick

. early on employees of a U.S. corporation were sitting in Kuwait waiting for orders to plant wmd in Iraq.

I can't get my mind to drop the memory of reading a number of articles about the -

. deaths of big-time bio-chemist specialists - deaths from lots of heart attacks, accidents, and some suicides.

Do you think that Cheney and Rumsfeld could announce that this bacteria is the wmd they warned about? Could they say that they were right in invading Iraq to protect us from wmd?

[Dhalgren]

8. They may "claim it" (who knows what they'll claim next), but

this bacterium is a naturally occurring bacterium that has been present in that part of the world for ever - at least that's how I understand it. But will this bunch of fascists make unsupportable claims? Oh, count on it...