Health

Listen To Mom: Wash Those Hands

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

December 3, 2001 / 5:04 PM EST / CBS

For U.S. Marines based in the Afghan desert, one of the secrets of waging war in this harsh climate is a lesson most learned from their mothers.

Wash your hands.

The failure of the Soviets to follow that most basic rule of hygiene helps explain why they lost their war in Afghanistan, according to a U.S. military report.

The report says that of 620,000 Soviets who served in Afghanistan, an astounding 75.76 percent were hospitalized, most of them - 88.56 percent - not from war wounds, but from diseases often prevented by basic hygiene.

"It was due to the nonexistence of hygiene facilities," U.S. Navy flight surgeon Cmdr. Steven, of Portland, Ore., said Monday. (Military rules prohibit publication of the last names of most troops based at this desert airfield.) "No one ever washed their hands."

Nearly nine in 10 of the Soviet troops hospitalized were not wounded in battle but struck down by disease, especially hepatitis and typhoid.

"We learned a lot," Steve said. "It was devastating for them."

The report says that at any one time during the Soviet Union's decade-long occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, more than a quarter of its troops were incapacitated by illness.

Staying clean is a struggle, with no running water, and sand everywhere - a dust storm blew across the base Monday. Until Saturday, there were not even latrines.

And yet eight days after Marines arrived in Afghanistan, "we have had zero hygiene-related illnesses," the surgeon said.

All over the camp and even out on the forward lines, troops routinely strip to the waist in the warm sun and clean themselves as best they can, with bottled water, soap and a towel. Marines must shave daily, though they are allowed to grow a mustache in the field.

The Marines are eating MREs, or meals ready-to-eat, and each has to prepare his own, using a water-activated heating element.

Menus include chicken with pasta, beef frankfurters or Mexican rice, accompanied by crackers and peanut butter or chocolate brownies and sweets. The MRE comes with only one plastic spoon so clean hands are important.

"We all emphasize to the Marines: Wash your hands, wash your hands, wash your hands," said Capt. Patricia, 26, a Marine Corps engineer originally from Sayre, Pa., Part of her job is to design and build sanitation facilities, including latrines.

"Whenever we set them up, I work closely with medical," said Patricia, one of the few women on the base taken over by the Marines just over a week ago.

At the medical center for the forward operating base - a few desert-brown tents and part of a building - doctors talked about the report on Soviet hygiene the health teams had studied before coming to Afghanistan.

The report, published in 1995, is called "Medical Support in a Counter Guerrilla War: Lessons learned in the Soviet Afghan War." The war ended in 1991 with a humiliating retreat after a 10-year campaign.

The report said Soviet troops suffered from poor pesonal hygiene, including cooks who helped spread disease by failing to wash their hands. There were no proper latrines, soldiers failed to wash themselves or change their clothes, and had poor food and little clean water.

That resulted in the spread of hepatitis, cholera, typhoid and other illnesses that could have been prevented.

The report says the Russian army has studied how the U.S. military kept its troops so healthy during the Gulf War in 1991.

The Marines will not say how many casualties they could cope with, but they have set up an operating room in a tent and have filled a warehouse with more than a dozen cots and stretchers.

Two more tents could accommodate more patients, though doctors say the aim would be to evacuate casualties to ships in the Arabian Sea or to another country. A heavy-lift CH53 Super Stallion helicopter is on constant standby for that contingency.

"We certainly can do more than what we expect for the missions out here," said Bruce, another of the doctors, who are all from the Navy as the Marine Corps has no medical personnel.

But doctors here hope for nothing to do: no illnesses, no wounds.

"Somebody said, before we left, 'May you have boredom,"' said another doctor, Lt. Cmdr. Tracy, 33 of Camden, N.J.