In the USA troops, the ratio of death rate for disease/death rate for combat wounds was 7:1 during the Mexican war (1846–1848) and 5:1 during the Spanish war in 1898. During the war campaign in Madagascar, 1895–1896, 30% of French soldiers lost their lives, approximately one hundred to combat wounds and 4500 to infectious diseases (malaria, typhoid, dysentery). It has been estimated that among the 600,000 French soldiers who lost their lives in war during the eighteenth century, over 50% were due to disease. This situation induced Napoleon to retire from the New World and leave Louisiana for the then-nascent United States of America (USA) to concentrate his efforts in Europe. More recently, Napoleon lost 90% of his army deployed to Haiti, 27,000/30,000 soldiers including the commander, who was Napoleon’s brother-in-law, as a consequence of yellow fever, which was endemic in Haiti, but unknown to the French troops, which were, therefore, highly vulnerable. In 431 BCE, the outcome of the Peloponnesian war between the Athens of Pericles and Sparta was determined by the so-called “plague of Athens”, a terrible epidemic responsible for the death of approximately one-third of the Athens’ population, of Pericles and two of his sons, which seems to have been due to an outbreak of Salmonella typhi, as recently reported.
#Civil war hospital ship j.k. barnes union series
The military are particularly exposed to the risk of infectious diseases for a series of reasons, including the community life, often in precarious environmental conditions regarding the hygiene of water and food supply, sanitation, the traumatism with contaminated wounds, and the possibility to be exposed to extreme temperatures and to diseases unknown in their country of origin, for which no natural immunization has, therefore, been developed. The military worldwide have always been challenged with the issue of infectious diseases, which may deeply influence the outcome of battles/wars. Currently, the civil–military medical collaboration is getting closer and becoming interdependent, from research and development for the prevention of infectious diseases to disasters and emergencies management, as recently demonstrated in Ebola and Zika outbreaks and the COVID-19 pandemic, even with the high biocontainment aeromedical evacuation, in a sort of global health diplomacy. In this work, the military relevance of some vaccine-preventable and non-vaccine-preventable infectious diseases, as well as of biological weapons, and the military contributions to their control will be described. Meanwhile, Major Walter Reed in the United States of America discovered the mosquito vector of yellow fever, thus paving the way for its prevention by vector control. Emil von Behring, Ronald Ross and Charles Laveran, who were or served as military physicians, won the first, the second, and the seventh Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for discovering passive anti-diphtheria/tetanus immunotherapy and for identifying mosquito Anopheline as a malaria vector and plasmodium as its etiological agent, respectively. At the end of the nineteenth century, with the birth of bacteriology, military medical researchers in Germany, the United Kingdom, and France were active in discovering the etiological agents of some diseases and in developing preventive vaccines. Epidemic typhus, plague, malaria, cholera, typhoid fever, hepatitis, tetanus, and smallpox have nearly constantly accompanied wars, frequently deeply conditioning the outcome of battles/wars more than weapons and military strategy.
The environmental conditions generated by war and characterized by poverty, undernutrition, stress, difficult access to safe water and food as well as lack of environmental and personal hygiene favor the spread of many infectious diseases.
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