DISEASE IN WAR.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVI, 21 August 1926, Page 11

DISEASE IN WAR.

o K ■E of the last duties of; the late Lieutenant-General. Sir B. Leisliinan, as director-general of the Army Med real Services, was to superintend the compilation of an Army Manual on Sanitation.

To the soldier, the preservation of health in peace and war is of paramount importance. Emphasising this point, the manual states that n large proportion of the diseases of armies is preventable, and as a rule many more men are lost through disease than through enemy action. In the Waleheren expedition in 1805) the deaths from disease were .‘547 per 1000 of strength, and the number of men who were non-effective through sickness, practically at the same time, may he estimated as including the whole force.

During the Peninsular War, three times as many, men were lost by sickness as by wounds, and more than twice the strength of the whole army passed through the hospitals during that, war on account of disease. There are also instances of military expeditions being abandoned on account of attacks of disease in the camps of concentration. In the campaign in ■South Africa, (5!) men per 1000 of the strength died from disease, and 740 per 1000 were at one time or another non-effective from sickness. For enteric fever alone there were 50,750 admissions to hospital, deaths amongst all ranks. The army medical authorities state that if this heavy incidence had occurred in France the total number of admissions during the war from typhoid and paratyphoid fevers would have reached a total of 570,000, with SO,OOO deaths, whereas there were only 7807 eases, with illiQ deaths.