The UK, the US and Canada are facing growing fears over a drug-resistant "superbug" being brought back by wounded soldiers from Afghanistan and Iraq that threatens to contaminate civilian hospitals.
The intensified concern comes amid sharply rising infection rates in the US and fresh worries in Canada that the bug could be imported into its civilian healthcare system.
The US military originally thought the bug came from contaminated Iraqi soil, but troops in Afghanistan have also been infected. Canada's public health service last week revealed it had ordered the screening of all its wounded soldiers being sent home from Afghanistan.
The bacterium, Acinetobacter baumannii, first emerged as a "mystery infection" afflicting US service personnel returning from the war in Iraq in 2003 and 2004. It was described by a scientific journal specializing in hospital epidemiology as the "most important emerging hospital-acquired pathogen worldwide."
The journal said it was potentially a "major threat to public health" due to its ability to mutate rapidly and develop a resistance to all known drugs.
VIRULENT
Although different types of acinetobacter have been known for decades in hospitals, the new "T" strain identified in the injured troops is particularly virulent and has been observed to appear in US servicemen within two hours of being admitted to a field hospital.
It affects the spinal fluid, bones and lungs, causing pneumonia, respiratory failure and other complications. Equally worrying is its resilience. Extremely difficult to eliminate from medical facilities once established, the bug can survive for up to 176 days in a human host.
US officials concede that, once established in the medical evacuation chain, the germ is almost impossible to stamp out.
Although the British Ministry of Defence tried to play down fears of the infection when the first suspected British cases were reported last year in The Lancet, its increasingly rampant progress through the US military hospital system has been causing intense alarm elsewhere.
Canadian military doctors investigated the infection in Canadian troops at an intensive care unit in Kandahar and published a report in the journal BMC Infectious Diseases earlier this year.
ALARM BELLS
The officers warned that their findings about the infection risk were "equally applicable to US and British military field hospitals as well," adding that "the environmental and logistical problems that faced [the medical units involved] are common across field hospitals in Afghanistan and Iraq."
"Unrestricted use of antibiotics" at the field hospitals to compensate for poor environmental conditions had contributed to the emergence of the new superstrain, they said.
One of the report's authors, Major Homer Tien, said from Kandahar, Afghanistan on Saturday that further outbreaks appeared inevitable.
"No one really knows how it is being transmitted. What is certain is that it is a big concern," he said.
"A lot of the work I was doing was trying to pinpoint the source of the infection. We still can't say what the source was. If we can't prevent it, the next question is how we can keep the hospitals back home in the UK and Canada from being infected," Tien said.
Concern is high in Canada because its injured troops are treated in the civilian healthcare system -- like in the UK -- while most Americans troops are treated in the military hospital network.
Rates of infection have risen sharply in the US. In 2001 and 2002, around 2 percent of admissions were infected at a specialist army burns unit in Texas. By 2003 the rate had risen to 6 percent, then 12 percent by 2005, a rate consistent with other facilities. So far 27 servicemen have died from the infection.
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