Click here to cancel reply. September 20, Barnard 3. April 13, eJournals — making the most of online journal platforms March 12, Dysentery in WW1. Ross and colleagues in Alexandria, Leave a comment Click here to cancel reply. When they were within one foot they were supposed to be filled in and the soldiers had the job of digging a new one. Sometimes there was not time for this and men used a nearby shell-hole. Dysentery caused by contaminated water was especially a problem in the early stages of the war.
The main reason for this was that it was some time before regular supplies of water to the trenches could be organised. Soldiers were supplied with water bottles, that could be refilled when they returned to reserve lines.
However, the water-bottle supply was rarely enough for their needs and soldiers in the trenches often depended on impure water collected from shell-holes or other cavities.
Later, to purify it, chloride of lime was added to the water. Only twice during the Gallipoli campaign did the proportion of Anzac troops being evacuated with wounds exceed those being taken off due to some form of illness.
The situation was scarcely better on the Western Front. In August , ten infantrymen in the French army had contracted severe haemorrhagic dysentery — described as diarrhoea with heavy blood loss. Investigation of this outbreak was assigned to a young French-Canadian scientist Felix d'Herelle. At this critical time during the war, many researchers at the Institut Pasteur practically lived in the laboratory, often working through the night on important scientific pursuits. And it was in these moments he made his great discovery.
Previous research had suggested the possibility an invisible agent possibly a virus could kill bacteria. To investigate this, he decided to mix filtered bacteria-free faeces from dysentery-infected soldiers with a layer of Shigella bacteria he grew in a petri dish. Before antibiotics were developed in , bacterial infections such as pneumonia and tuberculosis were among the leading causes of death in industrialised societies. These included skin and eye infections, septicaemia and intestinal diseases.
The therapy was administered to patients orally, by injection or even through the general water supply. But the use of phage therapy did not persist. Scientific understanding of bacteriophages and biology at the time was limited.
Perhaps the most notable problem was that viruses remained invisible to human eyes until the electron microscope was developed in the late s. But with the meteoric rise of antibiotics in treating bacterial diseases from onwards , use of bacteriophages to treat bacterial infections was largely forgotten. We have now entered a new era in which the World Health Organisation has declared antibiotic resistance a global health priority.
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