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Trench nephritis, also known as war nephritis, is a kidney infection, first recognised by medical officers as a new disease during the early part of the First World War and distinguished from the then-understood acute nephritis by also having bronchitis and frequent relapses. Trench nephritis was the major kidney problem of the war.
The disease is classically a five-day fever of the relapsing type, rarely exhibiting a continuous course. The incubation period is relatively long, at about two weeks. The onset of symptoms is usually sudden, with high fever, severe headache, pain on moving the eyeballs, soreness of the muscles of the legs and back, and frequent hyperaesthesia of the shins.
The predominant disease in the trenches of the Western Front was trench fever. Trench fever was a common disease spread through the faeces of body lice, which were rampant in trenches. Trench fever caused headaches, shin pain, splenomegaly, rashes and relapsing fevers – resulting in lethargy for months. [55]
Trench foot was an informal name applied to the condition from its prevalence during the trench warfare of World War I. [1] Health officials at the time used a variety of other terms as they studied the condition, but trench foot was eventually formally sanctioned and used. [2] Informally, it was also known as jungle rot during the Vietnam War. [5]
These diseases could take a massive toll on the soldiers, with trench fever possibly pulling a soldier away from the front lines for months at a time. Rats were carriers of lice . Lice can also transmit disease and played a role in spreading trench fever amongst the soldiers.
The frontlines of Russia’s war in Ukraine have become infested with rats and mice, reportedly spreading disease that causes soldiers to vomit and bleed from their eyes, crippling combat ...
Along with enemy action, many soldiers had to contend with new diseases: trench foot, trench fever and trench nephritis. When the war ended in November 1918, British Army casualties, as the result of enemy action and disease, were recorded as 673,375 killed and missing, with another 1,643,469 wounded. The rush to demobilise at the end of the ...
The front soon bogged down into trench warfare, similar to that on the Western Front, but at high altitudes and with extremely cold winters. Fighting along the front displaced much of the local population, and several thousand civilians died from malnutrition and illness in Kingdom of Italy and Austro-Hungarian refugee camps. [7]