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Iraqi war involves drug-resistant bacteria

SAN ANTONIO, May 16 (UPI) -- Scientists have found U.S. soldiers in Iraq do not carry the bacteria that cause drug-resistant wound infections suffered in that conflict.

Dr. Matthew Griffith of the Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio said he and his colleagues found drug-resistant strains of Acinetobacter calcoaceticus-baumannii complex are not present on the skin of uninjured soldiers in Iraq, as had been expected.

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A. calcoaceticus-baumannii complex is an important cause of trauma-associated and hospital-acquired infection around the world and multidrug-resistant strains of the bacteria have been infecting injured soldiers in Iraq.

"We need to know where these infections are coming from," said Griffith, the study's lead investigator. "One of the possibilities was that A. calcoaceticus-baumannii was on the soldiers' skin before injury and simply traveled to the wound site to cause the infection. However, our research shows that this is not the case."

In addition, he said the study's findings add to a growing body of evidence implicating nosocomial transmission as the cause of the outbreak.

The research appears online in the journal Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology and will appear in the journal's June print edition.

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