Fri Jan 6, 9:21 PM ET

SAN ANTONIO, Texas (Reuters) - Military medical advances are keeping more soldiers alive in the Iraq War but also creating a growing pool of badly wounded veterans who will need expensive, long-term medical care, the U.S. secretary of Veteran Affairs said on Friday.

"We have cut fatalities a great deal and as a result of that we have people who are now seriously wounded who in previous wars would have been dead," Secretary Jim Nicholson in a visit with wounded soldiers at San Antonio's Brooke Army Medical Center.

"We need to provide and continue to provide these people with world class health care and we need to be there when they need it in the future."

More than 2,000 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq and nearly 9,000 have been wounded, according to the
Pentagon.

Nicholson also said post-traumatic stress disorder is becoming increasingly common for returning Iraq veterans, but they are in good hands because the
Department of Veterans Affairs "is the world's leading expert on PTSD."

"We have a major resource center for this in Vermont and every one of our 157 major medical centers we have a highly trained PTSD specialist," he said. "We are indeed ramped up to take care of this phenomenon."

Nicholson said the current Veterans Affairs budget of $70 billion is up 57 percent during the four budget years of the Bush administration.