Scientists have uncovered traces of paratyphoid fever and louse-borne relapsing fever in the teeth of French soldiers who died during Napoleon’s catastrophic 1812 retreat from Russia, offering new insight into the infections that helped decimate his Grande Armée.
The study, published in Current Biology, analysed remains from a mass grave in Vilnius containing up to 3,000 troops who arrived “exhausted, starving and ill” before dying in the freezing winter.
While starvation, typhus and brutal weather were long known killers, these newly identified pathogens—found in six of the 13 soldiers tested—would have spread rapidly in the army’s overcrowded, unsanitary conditions, further weakening soldiers already ravaged by hunger and cold.
Researchers say the findings help “put names to infections that symptom-based accounts alone cannot resolve,” and plan future work to better map the disease landscape of Napoleon’s doomed campaign.
nb: ‘louse- borne relapsing fever’. We are going to see a resurgence of this type of disease if GMO’s are legalised carte blanche.
Commenting with my real name: So it had NOTHING to do with “extended” supply/support lines and the German defeat in WW2 was also due to “bacteria”. HUH..!!??