Another Insurgent

It's bad enough that we are fighting insurgents in Iraq, but it also appears that mother nature is conspiring to get us to go home too:

The young Army medic would not stop bleeding.

He had been put on a powerful regimen of antibiotics by doctors aboard the hospital ship Comfort in the Persian Gulf. But something was wrong.

He was in shock and bleeding from small pricks where nurses had placed intravenous lines. Red, swollen tissue from an active bacterial infection was expanding around his abdominal wound. His immune system was in overdrive.

How odd, thought Dr. Kyle Petersen, an infectious disease specialist. He knew of one injured Iraqi man with similar symptoms and a few days later encountered an Iraqi teenager with gunshot wounds in the same condition.

Within a few days, blood tests confirmed that the medic and the two wounded Iraqis were all infected with an unusual bacterium, Acinetobacter baumannii.

This particular strain had a deadly twist. It was resistant to a dozen antibiotics. The medic survived, but by the time Petersen connected the dots, the two Iraqi patients were dead.

It was April 2003, early in the Iraq war -- and 4 1/2 years later, scientists are still struggling to understand the medical mystery.