This is a great article that I read in my most recent issue of Wired Magazine (15.02). It talks about the spread of multidrug resistant Acinetobacter baumannii through hospitals and along the evacuation route of injured soldiers in Iraq. It turns out, as the author states, that by making the time it takes to get to the US about two days for an injured soldier, it also increases the risk of infection, especially when medical records are not properly transferred as well. Thought this was very interesting and pertained to Microbiology. I never knew that such a harmless organism in normal people could be so deadly in the immunocompromised.

“Wired News: The Invisible Enemy In Iraq”
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. In previous wars, he would have died within hours. 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. Minutes after the attack, a helicopter touched down in the desert. Combat medics stanched the marine’s bleeding, inflated his collapsed lung, and eased his pain. 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…
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The operating room at Ibn Sina Hospital in Baghdad, an Army facility implicated in the spread of Acinetobacter baumannii. Peter Van AGTMAEL/POLARIS