Diarrhea Once Killed More Soldiers Than Combat — and Is Still a Threat, with Mary Roach

Diarrhea Once Killed More Soldiers Than Combat — and Is Still a Threat,

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The Oregon Trail was an educational game often preloaded on many school computers. In it, students tried to get their wagon family all the way to Oregon, following the trail. Almost always, someone died of dysentery, leading to the ever popular meme, "You have died of dysentery."

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MARY ROACH:

Mary Roach grew up in a small house in Etna, New Hampshire. She graduated from Wesleyan in 1981, and then moved out to San Francisco. She spent a few years working as a freelance copy editor before landing a half-time PR job at the SF Zoo. During that time she wrote freelance articles for the local newspaper's Sunday magazine.

Though she mostly focuses on writing books, she writes the occasional magazine piece. These have run in Outside, National Geographic, New Scientist, Wired, and The New York Times Magazine, as well as many others. A 1995 article of herse called "How to Win at Germ Warfare" was a National Magazine Award Finalist, and in 1996, her article on earthquake-proof bamboo houses took the Engineering Journalism Award in the general interest magazine category. Mary Roach also reviews books for The New York Times.

Her first book, Stiff, was an offshoot of a column she wrote for Salon.com. Her other books include Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, and Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Mary Roach:  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.

And they are also doing the really high risk classified, you know, go in and take out Osama bin Laden, whatever, they're doing some of the more snipers there. So it's a situation that it may be a life or death situation too, meaning you can't sort of stop in the middle of a mission and go excuse me, I'm dealing with some extreme urgency. I've got to duck behind a rock. They're just in a situation where they're going to soil themselves. It was an interesting reporting challenge. I found myself in Camp Lejeune in Djibouti were a lot of this counterinsurgents work goes on. The special operations folks are off in their own restricted zone but they come into the cafeteria with everyone else. So I had to approach strangers over dinner to have conversations about diarrhea, which was an interesting reporting challenge. But to them it wasn't a silly topic. It was serious and they had a lot to say about it so it was really interesting.