Trench fever (also known as "Five day fever", "Quintan fever" (febris Quintana in Latin), "Urban trench fever") is a moderately serious disease transmitted by body lice. It infected armies in Flanders, France, Poland, Galicia, Italy, Salonika, Macedonia, Mesopotamia, and Egypt in World War I (three noted sufferers being the authors J.R.R. Tolkien, A. A. Milne, and C.S. Lewis), and the German army in Russia during World War I. From 1915 to 1918 between one-fifth and one-third of all British troops reported ill had trench fever while about one-fifth of ill German and Austrian troops had the disease. The disease persists among the homeless. Outbreaks have been documented, for example, in Seattle and Baltimore in the United States among injection drug users and in Marseille, France, and Burundi.
Trench fever is also called Wolhynia fever, shin bone fever, quintan fever, five-day fever, Meuse fever, His disease and His-Werner disease (after Wilhelm His, Jr. and Heinrich Werner).
The disease is caused by the bacterium Bartonella quintana (older names: Rochalimea quintana, Rickettsia quintana), found in the stomach walls of the body louse. Bartonella quintana is closely related to Bartonella henselae, the agent of cat scratch fever.
Read more about Trench Fever: Pathology and Transmission, Symptoms, Diagnostics, Treatment
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