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WHO WON THE WARS...
It’s a fact. Disease, much of it pest-related, accounts for a majority of non-battle losses in wartime;
the ratio was 7 out of 10 in World War II. The facts are as follows.
v After the battle of New Orleans ended the War of 1812, most survivors on both sides died of
malaria within a month.
v In the Spanish-American War, while 369 died in the battle, houseflies spread typhoid fever
killing most of the 1839 soldiers who contracted the disease. Others were done in by malaria
(362), yellow fever (143) and dengue fever (2), all vector-borne.
v Emphasis on sanitation during the Civil War brought the disease vs. battle ratio down to 2:1.
v Lice, ongoing problems where personnel are massed, spread typhus and trench fever as they did
in World War I. But the disease combat ratio went down to 1:1 in this war.
v In Korea, hemorrhagic fever, spread by rats, lead to a death rate among the stricken of 7 percent,
while mosquito-borne Japanese encephalitis virus caused death at an 8.5 percent rate.
v In Vietnam, malaria accounted for up to 9.8 percent of non-battle injury admissions. At one
time, the annual rate was 600 cases per 1000 troops.
v Finally, marines deployed in Beirut in 1958 came down with flyborne diarrheal diseases at a rate
of 50 percent. But, we are learning, from 1982-1984, disease rates in Beirut were kept down to
under 3 percent.
Pest Control Magazine November, 1992
Tidbits on Insect-Borne Diseases...
Malaria
~One million deaths among children under five years of age are attributed to malaria alone or in
combination with other diseases.
~Malaria is endemic in 91 countries, with about 40% of the world’s population at risk.
~Up to 500 million cases occur every year, 90% of them in Africa, and there are up to 2.7 million
deaths annually.
Yellow Fever
~200,000 cases of yellow fever now occur yearly in 33 endemic countries of the African continent,
the vast majority of them in sub-Saharan Africa.
Dengue
~500,000 yearly cases of DHF/DSS, 90% of whom are children under the age of 15 years.
~The average mortality rate is 5%, with some 24,000 deaths each year.
~Dengue is the world’s most important mosquito-borne virus disease, with 2.5 billion people
worldwide at risk of infection and 20 million cases a year in more than 100 countries.
Lymphatic filariasis
~Lymphatic filariasis, most commonly recognized by the elephantiasis and male genital damage it
causes, results from infection with parasitic worms transmitted by various species of mosquitoes.
~It is endemic in at least 73 countries where 120 million people are infected.