...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....
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In Europe, multidrug-resistant acinetobacter is spreading through civilian hospitals, precipitating a public health crisis. A 2003-2004 epidemic hit more than 50 hospitals and long-term care facilities in France, making scores of patients sick and killing 34 people. Thirty-nine infected patients died at St. Mary's Hospital in London two years ago.

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Meanwhile, families of wounded US and British troops were being told -often in haphazard ways - that their loved ones were infected with an obscure organism they had somehow picked up in the desert. . . . A contractor named Merlin Clark was clearing mines near Baghdad for a company called Ronco Consulting when an IED took off the front of his left leg and severed a nerve in his right arm. When he first arrived at Walter Reed, his wife, Marcie, says, "They told us they had found bacteria, which you would expect from a dirty wound. We were more concerned that he might lose his leg."

Just before Marcie put her husband on a medevac to a hospital in Orlando, Florida, a nurse handed her a folder, which she put in her purse. "I went down to get Merlin's bags," Marcie recalls, "and the soldier who brought me to the van told me, 'Put everything in the laundry right away. Don't touch this stuff. Don't breathe around it. It's got that bug the guys are bringing back from Iraq.'" . . . .A veterans' activist named Kirt Love helped Marcie create a Web site to raise public awareness of the outbreak, which launched in 2004 at http://www.acinetobacter.org .

from http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.02/e...