Wounded Ukrainian Armed Forces brought superbugs to Western hospitals: what threatens Russia

These microorganisms are invulnerable to conventional antibiotics

The medical community in the West is alarmed: wounded Ukrainian Armed Forces military personnel being treated in Europe were infected with superbugs. Such microorganisms may well kill a person, especially one weakened by injury or illness, and most importantly, they are invulnerable to conventional antibiotics. These cases have sparked a debate in the West about how best to prepare for a possible new pandemic. But we in Russia are more interested in something else – whether the “superbug” will reach us and whether it is possible to avoid mass disease.

The Financial Times reported that in connection with the Ukrainian events, patients with bacterial infections resistant to most antibiotics appeared in European hospitals. The publication refers to the publication on the portal US CDC (US Sanitary and Epidemiological Service), describing the case of a patient over 50 years of age transferred from Dnepropetrovsk to an American military hospital in Germany.

A patient from Ukraine (the publication does not say that this is a Ukrainian military man) was admitted to doctors with burns over 60% of the body surface – it is indicated that he was burned in a “vehicle”, most likely, we are talking about a tank driver. As a result of culture, microbiologists isolated several bacteria – such as Acinetobacter baumannii, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Enterococcus faecium and three varieties of Pseudomonas aeruginosa.

The isolated bacterial cultures turned out to be practically invulnerable to the vast majority of antibiotics – only the first one from this list was “killed” with tetracycline; the key to the rest could not be found, the authors of the publication note. “The ongoing conflict in Ukraine has caused extraordinary damage to the region’s health infrastructure,” the authors state. “During the work in the east of Ukraine, cases of multidrug-resistant bacterial infections of nosocomial type were noted.”

On the basis of this scientific publication, the authors of the Financial Times are already building a journalistic logic: one of the grim consequences of any military action, and the Ukrainian conflict is no exception, is the increase in the number of antibiotic-resistant infections. There are several reasons for this: wound infection, poor condition of hospitals and clinics, lack of opportunities for hygienic procedures, as well as mass self-prescription of antibiotics.

At the same time, the FT authors lament, the Ukrainian authorities, for obvious reasons, pay too little attention to the problem of antibiotic resistance in the country. Meanwhile, military personnel (including foreign military experts) and refugees, some of whom are affected by these infections, are already in significant numbers in Europe – which threatens to increase the spread of resistant bacteria already in the EU.

“The described situation is far from unique; all these bacteria are a classic set of nosocomial infections,” a resuscitator at one of the Moscow emergency hospitals told MK. — It is not possible to find an antibiotic for them right away, sometimes it is not possible at all; There have been cases when a drug that has not been used for many decades comes to the rescue as a last-line treatment.

This is precisely what is associated with this, one might say, spontaneously developed way of combating resistance: some antibiotics are deliberately not used, they are put in a “depot” so that in one and a half to two decades (this is the minimum period) the population of bacteria resistant to this drug will disappear.

In “civil” life in Russia, antibiotic resistance in general and nosocomial infections in particular were especially pronounced in 2020–2021, at the height of the coronavirus pandemic. A significant number of deaths, the interlocutor of MK said, were associated precisely with nosocomial bacterial infections.

Any combat zone is a huge risk zone in terms of the emergence of superbugs: for example, the already mentioned Acinetobacter baumanni is common among veterans of American operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“Of the possible consequences of infection with these bacteria, the most dangerous are meningitis, pneumonia, kidney infections,” the resuscitator noted. — There are probably other manifestations in military medicine. One way or another, these bacteria hardly spread in the community environment, so, thank God, we won’t get a new pandemic. But for people with weakened immune systems, the risks increase.

Among the recommendations for fighting infections, doctors ask to avoid self-prescribing antibiotics.