Beating the Smallest Enemies

Jay Price of McClatchy Newspapers put up an interesting post yesterday afternoon that I happened to catch off of Memeorandum.com, which reminds us that traditionally, it isn't the dramatic wounds of battle that cause most military casualties, but disease and non-combat injuries, and that the supermajority of medical evacuations of military personnel from Iraq are not the result of enemy fire.

Disease, however, too is another native insurgency in which our military seems to have gained the upper hand:

An example of that success is the U.S. fight against leishmaniasis, a parasitic disease spread by sandflies that causes festering wounds and can attack the organs.

When the British army came to Iraq in the 1930s, leishmaniasis incapacitated up to 30 percent of the troops, said Lt. Col. Ray Dunton , a trained entomologist who's in Iraq serving as chief of preventive medicine for the 62nd Medical Brigade.

In 2004, hundreds of U.S. soldiers also were infected. Preventive medicine teams went into action, spraying insecticide and urging troops to use insect repellant. Infestations dropped from an average of 140 a month to nearly zero. Only 10 people have been diagnosed with leishmaniasis this year.

Informed of the situation, Harry Reid's staff is scrambling to issue a statement declaring the war against battlefield illnesses "lost."