- After a helicopter crash in Iraq, Chief Warrant Officer
3 Claude Boushey Sr. underwent surgery in Germany for a broken back and
to insert a titanium rod into his left leg.
-
- Moved later to Tripler Army Medical Center, the Schofield
Barracks pilot found out something else: He had tested positive for antibiotic-resistant
bacteria known as Acinetobacter baumanii.
-
- "I was kind of alarmed. I was like, what is it?"
said Boushey, a 1983 Campbell High School graduate. "It took me a
week just to pronounce it."
-
- The so-called superbug, a peculiarity of the Iraq war,
can cause infections, fever and pneumonia.
-
- A spate of about 50 cases involving soldiers evacuated
from Iraq was noticed in 2003 aboard the Navy hospital ship Comfort. Two
Iraqi patients died of the infection.
-
- None of the cases involved fighting in Afghanistan. The
numbers are noteworthy, said the International Society for Infectious Diseases,
since the infection was not noted in the 1991 Gulf War.
-
- Seven cases of acinetobacter have been recorded at Tripler
for Iraq war veterans, the first around April. A total of 136 Pacific-based
soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan have come through Tripler for
outpatient or inpatient care.
-
- One acinetobacter patient was identified as having the
bacteria before arriving at Tripler. The six positives identified at the
hospital included four actual infections and two who had it on their skin,
but weren't infected, said Col. Susan Fraser, chief of infectious diseases
at Tripler.
-
- "They (the cases) have come out of Iraq, and the
other oddity is it's very, very drug-resistant, and that's unusual,"
Fraser said. The bacteria have been successfully treated with the Carbapenem
class of antibiotics. Amikacin and Polymixin B also can be used, she said.
-
- Fraser said the bacteria, believed to live in soil, are
found around the world.
-
- "It's actually the type of bacteria that we see
in hospitals - oftentimes in intensive-care units," Fraser said. "This
particular bacteria takes advantage of people who are sick, people who
are on ventilators for instance, so they've got artificial breathing tubes,
and they've got IVs stuck in all different kind of veins."
-
- What's different at Tripler, at least in the past three
years that Fraser has been there, is the drug resistance.
-
- "That's the first time at least that I've seen (the
multiple-drug resistant variety)," she said.
-
- Acinetobacter can reside harmlessly on the skin. Fraser
said that if cultures were taken from 100 people pulled off Waikiki Beach,
some of them would turn up positive. "It's not something that the
general public needs to be afraid of or scared of," she said.
-
- Why Iraq has been tied to positive tests for acinetobacter
infections and not Afghanistan is a mystery.
-
- "None of us really know the answer to that question,"
she said.
-
- Fraser said the information she received was that 15
percent of the soldiers being screened at Walter Reed Army Medical Center
in Washington tested positive for the bacteria.
-
- All soldiers returning from the battlefield for care
at Tripler now are screened for the bacteria.
-
- Boushey, 38, and his co-pilot, Lt. Dwight Mears, 25,
crash-landed in their OH-58D on June 13 near Taji Air Base north of Baghdad.
-
- Mears said the observation helicopter experienced an
engine failure as the pair were traveling low and fast, and Boushey, the
more experienced pilot, guided the chopper to a swampy area.
-
- "I credit him with steering us away from several
lethal obstacles, such as a house and telephone wires that we nearly impacted,"
Mears said.
-
- Mears, who also broke his back, is recovering in his
hometown of Corvallis, Ore. His father said he has not tested positive
for acinetobacter.
-
- © COPYRIGHT 2004 The Honolulu Advertiser, a division
of Gannett Co. Inc. http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/2004/Jul/14/ln/ln01a.html
-
|