Friday, January 16, 2004

YIKES!
After six months of study, military and civilian medical investigators are still baffled at what caused a spike in an extremely rare form of pneumonia among soldiers in Iraq.

As summer approaches -- and with it the threat of a new outbreak -- they have ruled out all known causes and are settling into intense research to try to find the cause, Col. Bruno Petruccelli, the director of epidemiology and disease surveillance at the U.S. Army Medical Corps, told United Press International Wednesday...

Military health officials believe the culprit to be acute eosinphilic pneumonia, or AEP. Worldwide it occurs in .1 person per 100,000 -- or one in a million. In Iraq, doctors saw a rate nearly 100 times that.

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