Posted on 08/04/2003 7:05:13 AM PDT by dead
The United States Army has dispatched a team of medical experts to Iraq to investigate a serious outbreak of pneumonia among US troops, with two dead and more than 100 ill.
Lieutenant-General James Peake, the army's surgeon general, has sent a team of six to Iraq and two more doctors to Landstuhl Regional Medical Centre in Germany, where some of the troops were treated after being flown from Iraq, officials said on Friday.
Army Medical Command spokeswoman Lyn Kukral said: "It is pneumonia. The question is: what is the cause?"
"You've got a healthy population and a young population [of US troops], and you have two soldiers who have died, and that's a concern."
Ms Kukral said there had been more than 100 cases among US troops in Iraq since the beginning of March, including 15 serious enough to warrant medical evacuation and the need for ventilators.
Of these 15, two soldiers died, 10 had recovered and three remained in hospital, Ms Kukral said.
Though most of the cases involved army personnel, at least one marine had been sick.
The teams being sent to Iraq and Germany are hunting for a possible common thread.
The troops who have come down with pneumonia were geographically dispersed and came from different military units.
The cases also occurred periodically over five months rather than all at once.
Ms Kukral said no infectious agent such as a bacterium or virus had been discovered to be common to all the cases.
"We have no evidence to indicate that there are chemical or biological weapons or environmental toxins involved," she said, adding that medical experts have also ruled out severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, as a possibility.
The six-person team heading to Iraq will include two physicians - an infectious disease specialist and an epidemiologist - as well as two microbiologists, a laboratory technician and a preventive medicine technician.
The team going to Germany is made up of an infectious disease specialist and an epidemiologist.
The teams will review medical records and question patients and medical workers. The Iraq team would also sample soil, water and air to gauge whether these factors might be playing a role, Ms Kukral said.
The parents of one US soldier who died in Iraq after contracting the mysterious pneumonia-like illness are convinced that their son had stumbled across chemical weapons while clearing rubble from one of Saddam Hussein's palaces.
Josh Neusche, 20, who had been conducting clean-up operations in Baghdad, died on July 12 after being transferred from his base at the airport to a US military hospital in Germany. Army specialists are analysing tissue samples from his liver, kidneys and lungs before issuing a certificate with a formal cause of death.
Ms Kukral said the actual number of pneumonia cases was not unexpected given the number of US troops in Iraq and the region. She said it might be that the cases were unrelated to one another. A desert environment could also exacerbate respiratory problems, she said.
Reuters; The Telegraph, London
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.