Soldiers jog every day to keep their body fit in their tour of duty but have to endure the dust around the base

Even to a physician like U.S. Army Capt. D.J. Doyle, the list of diseases in Afghanistan is frightening: typhoid fever, dengue fever, polio, cholera, leishmaniasis, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever.

And then there's the dust.

"I go running every day. The first time I saw the dust in the air, I thought 'Oh my God, I'm going to get so sick,'" said Doyle, 38, acting surgeon for the 82nd Airborne Division in Afghanistan. "But it just hasn't happened."

The threat of disease and ailments hangs over any military force entering a foreign environment. In a country like Afghanistan, where sanitation and Western hygiene standards are virtually nonexistent and soldiers interact with the populace regularly, the prospect is even more unnerving.

"For a U.S.-trained physician and soldier, the idea of going to a place where something like hemorrhagic fever is endemic scares the hell out of me," Doyle said.

U.S. medical planners' fears of illness were based on past experience. In Vietnam, malaria sapped many troops' strength. Concerns were also stoked by the experience of the Soviet army during its war and occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s.

An estimated two-thirds of all Soviet troops who fought in Afghanistan were hospitalized with some disease or illness. Hepatitis A, typhoid fever, malaria, dysentery and even plague were the primary diseases that afflicted the Soviets.

"It's not unrealistic to say the Soviets lost the war here because of disease non-battle injuries," Doyle said.

For U.S. military troops, disease non-battle injury rates have run at about 1 percent since U.S operations began in Afghanistan last November. Most problems have been respiratory, which is attributed to the high altitudes and the dusty environment.

Because many diseases in Afghanistan are also water- or food-borne, efforts also focus on basic hygiene. Combat troops out in the field are given bottles of anti-bacterial hand lotion and warned to stay away from locally-grown produce.

But all these things are not enough. "The bottom line is that war is not a healthy thing." Doyle said.

(Agencies)