The Army's medical treatment/evacuation system is contaminated with a super bug

[thewayne]

Man, this is tragic. Guy gets pretty seriously blown up in Iraq, they stabilize him in the field, further stabilize him in Germany, ship him home, and he dies of a bacterial infection. On October 17 he was given a day pass and went to Walmart with his mom and bought her a purse, on the 22nd he was brain dead and taken off life support.

"The surgeons, nurses, medics, and pilots of the evacuation chain have saved thousands of lives. Soldiers wounded in Vietnam were six weeks of transit time away from US hospitals, and one out of every four of them died. (edit: now soldiers are a week away from getting to Bethesda) By contrast, a soldier's odds of surviving battle injuries in Iraq are nine out of 10. Unfortunately, this remarkable advance in battlefield logistics has also resulted in an increase in the number of traumatically injured patients who are particularly susceptible to infections during their recovery. In Gadsden's case, from the moment he was carried into the Ibn Sina, the injured marine was in the crosshairs of an enemy he didn't even know was there."

http://www.wired.com/news/wiredmag/0,72532-0.html

Comments

[apostate-96.livejournal.com]

Damn, that is tragic! Surviving that kind of attack, just to be taken out by an infection. It really bothered me to see, too, that they didn't get all of his medical records, when it might've helped provide better treatment as he was fighting that infection off.

It reminds me of another news story I read about a similar pathogen they've found that, if infecting generally healthy people, can cause death in something like 24 hours from necrotizing pneumonia....where basically it just rots the lung tissue out and people drown.

Ugh!

[thedragonweaver.livejournal.com]

One of the current big nasties in hospitals is called MRSA, for, um... Multiple Resistant Staph... well, anyway, it's variants of staph infection that have developed resitance to several antibiotics. It lives in the air systems and in insufficiently-cleaned hospital materials, the former, of course, being the bigger worry.

On the bright side, there's a filtration system that is either in or just out of development that relies on electromagnetics instead of filters to clean the air, and it's estimated to decrease MSRA in a building by 99% or some similar number. Hospitals, of course, are VERY interested and looking to install these systems ASAP. With tech such as this, hospital deaths due to infection could drop by a big percentage.

And doesn't it suck that we already fought the infection battle once? Grrr.

[thedragonweaver.livejournal.com]

Of course, if I'd bothered to read the article first, I'd have seen that they identify MSRA quite handily.

Oops.

[apostate-96.livejournal.com]

I'd also read an article about a variant of it that kills in something like 24 hours through essentially rotting the lung tissue....something like necrotizing pneumonia.

I guess Nature has to keep us on our toes. I can't help thinking a threatening telegram would be nicer, though....