The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan from 1979 to 1988, by all accounts, did not go as well as they had anticipated. The locals were unsupportive of their efforts against the Mujahideen, the notoriously craggy terrain regularly chewed through soldiers’ boots, the Soviet army was frequently unable to provide suitable equipment, food and water to its own troops, and so on.
Along with these less than encouraging battlefield realities, the Soviet military suffered from a smorgasbord of infectious ills. It is estimated that throughout the nine-year occupation of Afghanistan, the annual attack rate of infectious diseases amongst Soviet troops ranged from a jaw-dropping 53% to 69%. A striking 67% of soldiers required hospitalization for a serious illness (1). Several researchers examining the medical side of the conflict have made the pointed remark that many of the Soviet-constructed hospitals were filled with their own military personnel rather than the Afghani population that they were originally intended for.
Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan in 1988 Image: Unknown. Image: Mikhail Evstafiev. Click for source.
Viral hepatitis and typhoid were largely responsible for disabling troops - there were 115,308 cases of hepatitis and 31,080 of typhoid fever. Another 269,544 cases have been attributed to plague, malaria, cholera, diphtheria, meningitis, shigellosis, amoebic dysentery, pneumonia, typhus, paratyphus and other illnesses. The sheer variety of diseases and magnitude of those infected is astonishing, even to an infectious disease scholar. That’s an impressively multitudinous bacteria-virus-parasite swap meet! I’m trying hard not to imagine Afghanistan as one massive pulsating, sandy petri dish right now.
