Casualties of War
The Winter issue of Perspectives in Biology and Medicine presents a thoughtful overview on war and its casualties. Throughout America's first 145 years of war, far more of the country's military personnel died from infectious diseases than from combat injuries. This only began to change in World War II due to better methods of disease prevention and treatment. The authors suggested that soldier deaths throughout U.S. history can be divided into a Disease Era (1775-1918), during which infectious diseases were the major killer of America's armed forces, and a Trauma Era (1941-present), in which combat-related injuries were the major cause of fatalities. Using the 3,400 U.S. military fatalities in Iraq as a comparison, suicide deaths have become more prevalent than deaths from infectious disease. Given the rising rate of suicides in U.S. soldiers posted overseas, this trend is not expected to change.
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