2 killed, more than a dozen others affected. The ill are being evacuated to a military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, where the second victim died on July 12th from multi-organ failure after falling ill with a ‘flu-like’ illness. Other victims are on respirators. Military scientists have ruled out the SARS virus as the cause. Many of those affected worked in the same engineering battalion in Baghdad, conducting ‘cleanup operations’. The dead soldier, a heavy equipment operator for the engineering battalion, had just returned froma four-day mission in the desert when he complained of feeling ill and went to lie down in his tent, where other soldiers found him comatose within hours. Although the soldier’s skeptical family were initially told their son had died of ‘pneumonia’, an earlier version of the story had military doctors saying that an unknown toxin was to blame and had quickly attacked his muscles, liver and kidneys. Environmental and epidemiological studies are proceeding.

I was pointed to this story from The Daily Rotten, which notes that the troops were working near the Baghdad International Airport and posits “a hypothetical cargo shipment from the United States which killed these soldiers. So perhaps we’re back on schedule to “discover” WMDs any day now.”

Update:

Two soldiers died, 10 recovered, and three remained hospitalized as of Friday, spokeswoman Lyn Kukral said. Most were in the Army, but at least one was a Marine.

So far, officials have identified no infectious agent common to all the cases. Officials said there was no evidence that any of the cases were caused by exposure to chemical or biological weapons, environmental toxins [emphasis added — FmH] or SARS.

Most of the cases were in Iraq and occurred after the U.S.-led invasion began March 20, although some were among other troops deployed to the region in support of the campaign.

Though 15 cases were considered serious, about 100 cases have been diagnosed since March 1 among troops that began deploying late last year to the Persian Gulf area. The Olympian (WA)

Relative to the conspiracy theory, there is no information about how closely the fifteen core cases were associated in time or space; is that information being suppressed? If these severe cases were from a native contaminant, we would probably have heard about it from the dysadministration as triumphal proof that they had finally found evidence of chemical or biological agents in Iraq. That we haven’t heard that suggests the possibility, as the Daily Rotten suggested, that the US has something to hide in the incident. Is a specific incident of toxic exposure being diluted by being lumped together with more disparate mystery illnesses of a broader range of severity and geographic distribution? Certainly, it is accepted epidemiological practice to examine the broadest possible range of cases to attempt to establish commonalities in a mystery outbreak, but it is also a great way to hide a problem in plain sight, as the saying goes.