Since there isn’t a thread. Is disease much of a problem in the U.S. Navy? - The Straight Dope
From my experience talking with ex-Navy guys, I’m surprised Cecil didn’t mention VD. Stops in Thailand are popular.
Also:
The first part - okay. But isn’t sharing a bunk (“hot cot”) still somewhat common? Maybe on submarines?
The combat deaths in Revolutionary war - 8000, other deaths around 17,000
Civil war - combat over 200,000, other deaths over 400,000
WW I - 54,000 and 64,000
WW II 290,000 and 110,000
Korea 33,000 and 2,000
Vietnam 47,000 and 10,000
WWII was the first major war where combat deaths exceeded non-combat deaths
Hey, I have a good sea story on this topic. During Memorial Day weekend of 2009, I was part of a helicopter detachment onboard USS Iwo Jima that took part in Fleet Week activities in NYC. That was the same time period that the swine flu hit NYC hard, causing massive school closings to try to contain the outbreak. Here is a short article on the impact on the ship- http://seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/2009318605_apusnavyswineflu.html. As part of the helicopter detachment, I got to fly off the ship a day before the ship pulled into port in Norfolk. That weekend, I brought my son to the zoo in Norfolk. While there I became violently ill with flu-like symptoms. I went to Medical the next day. I told the Corpsman who took my vitals that I thought I might have swine flu. He thought I was joking. I told him that I had been on the Iwo Jima. He handed me a breathing mask. They never actually tested me, so I am not one of the statistics, but I assume I did get the swine flu.
Also, to thelurkinghorror’s point about VD and Thailand, most of the ships I have been on require all sailors (male and female) to grab a handful of condoms before they are allowed off the ship, which cuts down greatly on the lines in medical for peniccilan(sp?) shots after we leave port.
MODERATOR COMMENT: mlewitt, since there was already a thread on this column, I’ve moved your post into that thread. OK? – Dex
I served on a submarine (SSN 690) from '04 to '07, and can confirm that hot bunking was common among junior crew members – there usually area few more people onboard then beds.
Bottom Line: A miserable time on a luxury liner is a man-bites-dog story; a miserable time on a Navy ship is a dog-bites-man story.
Back in the 1960’s they had an old aircraft carrier in San Diego named the USS Kearsarge CV 33 and as the story goes they caught 500 sailors practicing as homosexuals so they renamed the vessel the USS Queer Barge …
Isn’t that a disease?
Isn’t *what *a disease? Renaming a ship? Homosexuality? Your asininity?
WARNING
Way out of line, rude, mean-spirited, nasty thing to say.
Not cool. Not right.
Do not do this kind of thing again.
Cecil’s column presented a nice synthesis, comparing current disease rates in the Navy to past performance (2-3 orders of magnitude better) and current civilian experience (less than one order of magnitude worse). It’s interesting that despite knowledge of the germ theory of disease that WWI nonetheless had a ~1:1 disease v. combat mortality ratio. By WWII the ratio had dropped to something like 1:20.
[QUOTE=Cecil]
Quote:— the men had to sleep in shifts.
[/QUOTE]
They had to to sleep wearing a chemise? No wonder they thought it would be a good idea to get women into the navy…
I remember there being a meningitis scare when I was in boot camp. I don’t know how any germ could survive the cleaning we had to do, though.
Penicillin.
Annnnd the Spanish Flu
Our Navy is now shiftless? :eek:
More common is “pinkeye” and other IG distress due to unclean people. We also had something sweep through bootcamp that gave our entire division fevers of 103. I was on the USS IWO JIMA for 4 year, not much other than pinkeye, as I had mentioned, had occurred. Shortly after I left, when H1N1 was the thing, the ship was quarantined for that.
Overall, these statistics are pretty good considering the cramped quarters you live and work in. If they’d let people go home if they were sick would help a lot. But, you are treated like shit if you do such a thing so we tough it out and everyone goes down.
Too much water, and not enough drinking.
After he was sick, a friend of my fathers was told by the French Foriegn Legion that he was expected to drink the wine. If he drank the water again, he was going to be on report.
Posted with permission of Pat, a friend of mine who’s a former Navy doctor. He read Cecil’s article and then wrote:
*I Googled then read the original 5 page article about GI illness aboard US Navy ships 2000-2001. The methodology was less than perfect, but every scientific article has its flaws. The big differentiating factor is the size of the ship’s crew (the article defines large as greater than 1,000) and the churn of people on and off the ship.
So, a carrier with a crew of more than 5,000 with Marines coming and going is not the same as a 120 man submarine crew which has virtually no turnover. Yet each vessel is a “ship-week”, the denominator of the study.
On a sub the corpsmen are ultimately responsible for keeping the crew free from these types of illness (not the cooks and stewards). When an outbreak occurs on a sub (very rare), the hammer comes down hard on the corpsman like it would for the Captain if the sub ran aground (also very rare). It also doesn’t go well for the corpsman’s boss, the Submarine Medical Officer back at the dock where the sub tender is tied up. Fortunately this never happened to yours truly, but I worried about it.*
Come to think of it, the 1976 swine flu scare, which led to a crash national vaccination program, began among Army trainees at Fort Dix: 1976 swine flu outbreak - Wikipedia
This is quite interesting because while our Corpsman was a part of the crew and we interacted everyday, I can’t ever remember seeing a Medical Officer onboard the submarine, even in port, for any reason at all. If we were sick in port, we just went up to the Base Hospital, and if we got sick at sea, the Corpsman treated us, which might include a quarantine in the wardroom. But I never saw a Navy Doctor of any sort come onboard the boat.
Sub IDC Corpsmen are more Physicians Assistants in scope, while the corpsmen on a larger vessel may not have the same amount of training. I would imagine that they would have the regular Medical Officer types visit the larger vessels rather than the subs. I know that I was a training dummy for several IDC Corpsmen over the course of my first run in with cancer [the wound treatment bits]
<IDC Corpsmen are the ones that get also assigned to the Marines since traditionally Marines do not have corpsmen of their own.>