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From StrategyPage we get the following tidbit
August 5, 2002; U.S. military doctors learned early on in Afghanistan that the smallest cut could quickly turn into a serious infection. So the policy has been to warn the troops to get a large dose of antibiotics for the slightest scratch. The reason is simple; sanitation is primitive in that part of the world and the constantly blowing dust tends to contain fecal matter. The concept of outhouses and field latrines (a hole in the ground, covered over after the troops have filled it up) never caught on it a big way. So there's plenty of infectious crud in the air. Afghans are also susceptible to this, but with an average lifespan of about forty years, only the strong (infection resistant) survive. But even sturdy adult Afghans can get bad infections, so Special Forces medics find that carrying a large stock of antibiotics will win Americans friends. This is a moderate "D'oh!" to anyone with a modest knowledge of history, and especially military history (which, by definition, excludes almost everyone outside of the U.S., the editorial boards of the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, and most Democrats). Despite watermelons attempting to contrast the pristine streams of yesteryear with the sluggish, polluted waters of today, water-borne pathogens have been a serious problem since the first tribe settled down to practice agriculture (and pissed in the river upstream from their village). World War II was the first war in which American troops' deaths from disease and infection did not exceed the number of combat deaths (partially due to improved sanitation, but also due to the effect of sulfa drugs on a genetically inexperienced population of bacteria). This, incidentally, demonstrates the need for the kind of "nation-building" that progressives find boring and unenvironmental. However, teaching both the troops and the Afghans field sanitation, drilling some wells, and building concrete septic systems away from drinking water supplies, will bring a revolution to Afghanistan that a hundred thousand copies of the colleted works of Jean-Paul Sartre and Herbert Marcuse never could. John "Akatsukami" Braue Saturday, August 10, 2002 |
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