Bad Bugs, No Drugs

[Originally posted on goofyblog 1.29.07]

Dangerous bacteria, resistant to all antibiotics, have benefited from our war adventure in Iraq. The Grand daddy of them all is something called Acinetobacter baumannii. It got its start (possibly) from some contaminated medical supplies shipped from Germany to a medical facility in Iraq, Ibn Sina Hospital, at the start of the war. Since then, it has mutated.

“Bacteria that know how to disable or block the efficacy of multiple drugs are highly educated organisms. They’re typically the product of an environment where antibiotics are in frequent use, and they have downloaded genetic cheat codes from other resistant bacteria into their own DNA.

“[Acinetobacter] carries the largest collection of generic upgrades ever discovered in a single organism. Out of its 52 genes dedicated to defeating antibiotics, radiation, and other weapons of mass bacterial destruction, nearly all have been bootlegged from other bad bugs like Salmonella, Pseudomonas, and Escherichia coli.”

-Wired (full article here)

The bacteria can survive for weeks on stethoscopes, a blood-pressure cuff, mattresses, so it colonizes patients in hospitals and medical facilities. Then it’s imported into Europe and the U.S. on the bodies of wounded soldiers, where it spreads to civilian patients.

Different strains of the bacteria have been common for years, it only attacks the weak and older, but the use of multiple antibiotics as part of the highly-successful, survival-rate strategies employed by the US Military has caused a quicker mutation. And although hospitals in Iraq, Europe and the US have adapted new measures for minimizing the infection rate, once it takes hold it can kill, and nothing, save a strong immune system, makes a difference.