the other day

i mentioned this article was supposed to be coming out in wired. i also said i hoped and prayed it wasn't true. well, it does appear to be true

it's a long article, but well worth the read.

yet ANOTHER thing our deployed men and women have to worry about

The Invisible Enemy in Iraq

By Steve Silberman Also by this reporter 02:00 AM Jan, 22, 2007
A homemade bomb exploded under a Humvee in Anbar province, Iraq, on August 21, 2004. The blast flipped the vehicle into the air, killing two US marines and wounding another - a soft-spoken 20-year-old named Jonathan Gadsden who was near the end of his second tour of duty. In previous wars, he would have died within hours. His skull and ribs were fractured, his neck was broken, his back was badly burned, and his stomach had been perforated by shrapnel and debris.
Gadsden got out of the war zone alive because of the Department of Defense's network of frontline trauma care and rapid air transport known as the evacuation chain. Minutes after the attack, a helicopter touched down in the desert. Combat medics stanched the marine's bleeding, inflated his collapsed lung, and eased his pain. He was airlifted to the 31st Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad, located in an old health care facility called the Ibn Sina, which had formerly catered to the Baathist elite. Army surgeons there repaired Gadsden's cranium, removed his injured spleen, and pumped him full of broad-spectrum antibiotics to ward off infection.
Three days later, he was flown to the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, the largest American military hospital in Europe. He was treated for his burns, and his spine was stabilized for the 18-hour flight to the US. Just a week after nearly dying in the desert, Gadsden was recuperating at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, with his mother, Zeada, at his bedside.............

............Gadsden had a seizure and a heart attack the next day. The neurology team discovered that his cerebrum and cerebellum had swelled up overnight; he was clinically brain-dead. His family and minister were called to the hospital, and on October 22 he was taken off life support.
The Marine Corps public affairs office sent out the customary press release attributing Gadsden's death to "injuries as a result of enemy action." But then a few weeks later, Zeada's dentist told her a Florida newspaper was reporting that her son had died of bacterial meningitis. Aided by US representative Bill Young, Zeada - who works as a cardiac-care technician in South Carolina - demanded an investigation.
She discovered that an autopsy was performed shortly after her son's death. The coroner recorded the "manner of death" as "homicide (explosion during war operation)" but determined the actual cause of death to be a bacterial infection. The organism that killed Gadsden, called Nocardia, had clogged the blood vessels leading to his brain. But the acinetobacter had been steadily draining his vital resources when he could least afford it. For weeks, it had been flourishing in his body, undetected by the doctors at Haley, resisting a constant assault by the most potent antibiotics in the medical arsenal.............

Tech Tags: pathogen wounded+GIs mrsa acinetobacter iraq walter+reed