By Joe Fiorill
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Army has dispatched two epidemiological teams to Iraq and the surrounding region to investigate a recent rash of pneumonia cases among U.S. troops in the region, U.S. Defense Department officials said yesterday.  Of the 100 cases diagnosed since March, two soldiers have died and more than a dozen have been hospitalized.

“We’re sparing no effort to fully analyze and diagnose this condition,” Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Clinical and Program Policy David Tornberg said at a Pentagon briefing.

Streptococcus has been identified as the cause of pneumonia in at least two of the cases, Col. Robert DeFraites of the Office of the Army Surgeon General said at the briefing, but no such cause has been established for the two deaths.

No evidence so far indicates any biological warfare agent has played a role in any of the cases, DeFraites said.

“We’ve found no evidence of anthrax, smallpox or any other biological agent [to which] we can attribute the pneumonia,” DeFraites said.

“Based on all the information we have to date, there’s been no positive findings of any anthrax or smallpox or any other biological weapons.  So [I have come] pretty close to ruling it out,” he said.

DeFraites added after the briefing that chemical weapons have also been ruled out as a cause of the pneumonia cases.

Pneumonia is generally caused by infections, usually bacterial, or by noninfectious factors such as inhalation of dust, metals or smoke.  The American Lung Association lists inhaled food, liquid, gases and dust as noninfectious causes of pneumonia.  The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons Web site indicates a kind of “chemical pneumonia” can result from exposure to mustard gas.

Deaths Led to Dispatch of Special Teams

Fifteen of the U.S. troops with pneumonia have been placed on respirators, 10 of them in Iraq, DeFraites said, adding that the last confirmed case emerged last Wednesday.  No link has been established so far among the troops that developed pneumonia, and none of them appears to have transmitted any infection to any of the others, he said.

DeFraites said the total number of cases, at about 100, is within the range one would expect under normal conditions, given that up to 500 pneumonia cases are registered worldwide each year in the U.S. Army.

Nevertheless, the two deaths, which both occurred over the last two months, spurred the Army to send in the investigative teams, DeFraites said.  Seventeen Army troops died of pneumonia during the five-year period ending last year, he said.

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