Study: Lice Brought Down Napoleon's Army...

[edbermac]

Jan. 3, 2006— Lice played a key role in Napoleon Bonaparte's disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812, according to genetic research into the skeletal remains of the ill-fated army.

Napoleon marched into Russia in the summer of 1812, leading the largest army Europe had ever seen, some half million soldiers, toward Moscow.

The invasion was the French emperor's answer to tzar Alexander I's refusal of the Continental System, a system of economic preference and protection within Europe aimed to exclude British trade and reinforce the French economy at the expense of the other states.

Six months later, the Grande Armée was reduced to 25,000 men who retreated to Vilnius, Lithuania, in the freezing cold. Only 3,000 survived the war, weather and disease to continue the retreat. The dead were buried in mass graves.

One such grave, containing between 2,000 and 3,000 corpses, was discovered in 2001 in Vilnius during some construction work.

Analysis of the remains produced hard genetic evidence that louse-borne pathogens were a major factor in the French retreat from Russia, Didier Raoult, of the Université de la Méditerranée in Marseille, and colleagues reported in the January issue of The Journal of Infectious Diseases.

"We believe that louse-borne diseases caused much of the death of Napoleon's army," Raoult told Discovery News.

Human body lice transmit Borrelia recurrentis, Bartonella quintana and Rickettsia prowazekii, the agents of louse-borne relapsing fever, trench fever and epidemic typhus, respectively.

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20060102/napoleonarmy_his.html?source=rss

Geez, I got the crabs back in high school, but not THAT bad! But I guess it is kinda hard to fire a musket while scratching your groin...

[soothsayer]

1. So Napoleon is scratching in this picture? LOL

[Christa]

2. You beat me to it hehehe nt

[roguevalley]

3. finally! an explanation for the hand. Now about that jock issue ...

[kineneb]

4. I had read that typhus

was one of the major causes of death for that campaign. It was in a book on great turning points in history caused by diseases (can't remember title). The lice connection fits, because I remember the book discussing (lack of) hygene as a major factor in the spread of diseases. Obviously, the army had terrible living conditions which allowed the easy spread of diseases from all sources.

[necso]

5. The basics,

hygiene, sanitation, nutrition and the other elements of maintaining/promoting health are of tremendous importance to a military force -- and these have been (and are) too often neglected.

When, for example, you read of the effects of scurvy on sailors in the past (even after there were common preventive methods as accepted by some), you can't help thinking that the fundamentals are often unseen by many eyes -- even (and perhaps especially) the eyes of the powerful and successful.

[necso]

6. Gout was a bigger problem in those days also. /nt