According to an article in Wired a new massively drug resistant bacteria that has taken hold in many returnees from Iraq. The article suggests unusually rapid rates of genetic modification: “When a team of geneticists unlocked the secret of the bug’s rapid evolution in 2005, they found that one strain of multidrug-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii carries the largest collection of genetic 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.” Is this what we call iatrogenic disease?
COLLABORATORY: VITAL SYSTEMS SECURITY
The Vital Systems Security collaboration examines how, today, security is being constituted as an object of knowledge, intervention, and political reflection. It proposes that the security of vital systems such as energy, transportation, communication and health is one norm in relationship to which security is being reproblematized. A central goal of the collaboration is to examine these issues through collective, conceptually driven inquiry that addresses rapidly developing contemporary problems.
Another interesting aspect of that article is that it identifies the military medical infrastructure in Iraq as source/cause of disease event. Specifically, it is the unheard of SUCCESS of the contemporary military medical infrastructure (whereas 1/4 of wounded soldiers died in Vietnam, only 1/10 have died in Iraq) that has ultimately been problematic. Because to reduce deaths from wound injuries, the military has developed ‘rapid-response’ medical teams that are forced to work under less than hygienic conditions. Specifically, a military invention called ISO boxes-operating rooms built inside shipping containers-has been identified as a probable source:
“But almost all of the infected patients and carriers had received medical care at field hospitals in Iraq. Known as combat support hospitals or CSHs, these facilities had been hastily erected in tents and other temporary structures, in keeping with the Pentagon’s goal of a lean and mobile fighting force. Maintaining sterile conditions in the desert required creative efforts. Sand blew through every available opening in the walls, and the 130-degree days took their toll on drugs, power supplies, and diagnostic equipment. To move trauma care closer to the action, the DOD deployed modified shipping containers called ISO boxes as portable operating rooms. It was standard procedure to have a dozen nurses, surgeons, and anesthesiologists in each box crowded around two patients undergoing surgery simultaneously – an infection risk in any hospital.”
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