Diarrhea Once Killed More Soldiers Than Combat — and Is Still a Threat, with Mary Roach
- 6 years ago
The topic of diarrhea is often the subject of toilet humor, but among servicemen and women it can be a matter of life and death. The disease once killed more soldiers than combat, and remains a serious threat. Roach's latest book is "Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War" (http://goo.gl/mbRirO).
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Transcript - I started out with this amazing quotation from William Osler, the father of modern medicine, which I think he said in the 1890s. "Dysentery has been more fatal to soldiers than powder or shot," powder or shot being what they killed people with in combat and the statistics are amazing. The Mexican American War - diarrhea and Mexico seemed forever linked sadly. This ratio of seven to one soldiers killed from disease versus combat wounds, and a lot of it was dysentery. More than it was malaria it was dysentery. And dysentery is an extreme form of diarrhea where the pathogens are invading the lining of the intestine to the point where you have blood. And it's a serious situation. You're dehydrating; you're bleeding. Nowadays you don't see soldiers dying of diarrhea, but what you do have is situations where, especially in the special operations, Special Forces these folks who are operating say out in Somalia or Yemen dealing with villages that insurgents are coming in trying to win people over. They're sitting down to meals with a lot of like elders in the village, eating food that's not been refrigerated necessarily, water that's not filtered or treated and they're getting sick at a rate twice that of the average enlisted service members. Read The Full Transcript Here: http://goo.gl/T0aQn9.
Read more at BigThink.com: http://bigthink.com/videos/mary-roach-on-dysentery-during-wartime
Follow Big Think here:
YouTube: http://goo.gl/CPTsV5
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Transcript - I started out with this amazing quotation from William Osler, the father of modern medicine, which I think he said in the 1890s. "Dysentery has been more fatal to soldiers than powder or shot," powder or shot being what they killed people with in combat and the statistics are amazing. The Mexican American War - diarrhea and Mexico seemed forever linked sadly. This ratio of seven to one soldiers killed from disease versus combat wounds, and a lot of it was dysentery. More than it was malaria it was dysentery. And dysentery is an extreme form of diarrhea where the pathogens are invading the lining of the intestine to the point where you have blood. And it's a serious situation. You're dehydrating; you're bleeding. Nowadays you don't see soldiers dying of diarrhea, but what you do have is situations where, especially in the special operations, Special Forces these folks who are operating say out in Somalia or Yemen dealing with villages that insurgents are coming in trying to win people over. They're sitting down to meals with a lot of like elders in the village, eating food that's not been refrigerated necessarily, water that's not filtered or treated and they're getting sick at a rate twice that of the average enlisted service members. Read The Full Transcript Here: http://goo.gl/T0aQn9.