Does such a vulnerability create an opportunity for terrorists and widen the risk for US citizens stemming from soldiers returning from the war in Iraq?

Not surprising.I have always suspected that many outbreaks of disease have come from these kinds of circumstances.I think it may be possible that AIDS came from military testing in the 60's and somehow became centered in the gay sector in the western world............. is very suspicious that it would have this kind of unknown spreading pattern ........unless there had been something else helping it into that direction.I don't know why or how or even if it might have just been some kind of warfare testing that somehow went terribly wrong.................but it does look very suspicious and I would be surprised if this war doesn't end up having similar long lasting and slow to appear results.

THEY DON'T NEED ANTIBIOTICS THEY NEED SILVER. COLLOIDAL WASHED WOUNDS HEAL. SO SIMPLE TO MAKE AND SO SIMPLE TO USE. AND OUR TROOPS COULD BE SAVED. GET THIS TO WHERE IT NEEDS TO BE. DON'T CARE IF YOU PUT THIS ON THE BLOG OR NOT. JUST GET THE INFO WHERE IT CAN HELP OUR TROOPS.

Very interesting topic. However, you really supply little information. How many soldiers suffer from this, 3 or 3,000? Since when has it been occuring, one month or two years ago? What is the likely path for treatment or improvement, just use clorox when mopping the floors?

What kind of poor quality reporting is this? You should expand a bit, or is this just an intentional case of a blog supply a glob of useless information.

This is too important an article to have fualty spelling!

war wounds dont kill people medical procedures do?

Did you mean "acinetobacter?" If you're going to talk about a pathogen, please spell it correctly so readers are able to look up more information on the topic, instead of being stymied by an atrocious misspelling.

This is just one of the outcomes of a war that is not supposed to in effect and this is what happens when you are disobident to God. Everyone suffers even the innocent

Bacteria are very smart and resilient. Its not suprising at all that multi drug resistant strains are emerging. In the next 25 years, we will lose antibiotics as an effective medical tool. As a physician, I have already seen growth of more virulent and resistant organisms.

One of the greatest reasons for the modern boost to longevity are antibiotics. The thought of losing them is frightening. Get drug resistant pneumonia when your 42 and you will likely die. Get a bad finger infection with multi drug resistant organisms and you might lose the whole arm.

This is the way life (and death) was for centuries.We take antibiotics for granted, and its scary to think that they are just a passing fancy.

Don't think that we can just make more antibiotics...they are getting more difficult to create and even more expensive to manufacture. As soon as you release the new antibiotic to the world, the bacteria start working on how to resist them. We will lose the battle in the long run.

It's just plain scary to really think about, isn't it?

fualty? tell parsons to make sure to keep at least a couple copy editors around!

MRS A (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus)is the new threat to Hospital recoveries in North America. Why should we be suprised that MRS A (my Stephen King play on words for this terrible infection)surfacing in battle hospitals surprise anyone. It was only a matter of time.

While I was deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, my comrades and I had antibiotics forced on us from every direction. Daily pills, weekly pills, and injections for anything and everything real or feared. This practice is commonplace and widespread throughout the armed forces. I wonder whether over-use of these drugs might contribute to the emergence of resistant bacteria. I would not presume to claim that this is definitely the case but I have had a nagging suspicion since I posed the question to an Army doctor a year ago. He shrugged his shoulders and replied, "I don't know. I guess it's possible."

On such a short article, you would think you could proof read it - or at the very least run a spell check. You misspelled faulty.

My apologies on the misspellings. They're now fixed.

Christine, thank you so much for the link to my article in Wired (http://wired.com/news/wiredmag/0,72532-0.html). Doug, you'll find all the information you need in the article itself -- one can't expect Christine to be able to boil down 7,000 words into 70! And Federico, while MRSA is a huge problem too, Acinetobacter baumannii is not MRSA, but a different kind of bacteria.

Thanks for reading!