Trench fever


Trench fever is a moderately serious disease transmitted by body lice. It infected armies in Flanders, France, Poland, Galicia, Italy, Salonika, Macedonia, Mesopotamia, Russia and Egypt in World War I. Three noted sufferers during WWI were the authors J. R. R. Tolkien, A. A. Milne, and C. S. Lewis. 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, Meuse fever, His disease and His–Werner disease or Werner-His disease.
The disease is caused by the bacterium Bartonella quintana, found in the stomach walls of the body louse. Bartonella quintana is closely related to Bartonella henselae, the agent of cat scratch fever and bacillary angiomatosis.

Signs and symptoms

The disease is classically a five-day fever of the relapsing type, rarely exhibiting a continuous course. The incubation period is relatively long, at about two weeks. The onset of symptoms is usually sudden, with high fever, severe headache, pain on moving the eyeballs, soreness of the muscles of the legs and back, and frequently hyperaesthesia of the shins. The initial fever is usually followed in a few days by a single, short rise but there may be many relapses between periods without fever. The most constant symptom is pain in the legs. Recovery takes a month or more. Lethal cases are rare, but in a few cases "the persistent fever might lead to heart failure". Aftereffects may include neurasthenia, cardiac disturbances and myalgia.

Pathophysiology

Bartonella quintana is transmitted by contamination of a skin abrasion or louse-bite wound with the faeces of an infected body louse. There have also been reports of an infected louse bite passing on the infection.

Diagnosis

testing is typically used to obtain a definitive diagnosis. Most serological tests would succeed only after a certain period of time past the symptom onset. The differential diagnosis list includes typhus, ehrlichiosis, leptospirosis, Lyme disease, and virus-caused exanthema.

Treatment

-group antibiotics are commonly used. Chloramphenicol is an alternative medication recommended under circumstances that render use of tetracycline derivates undesirable, such as severe liver disease, kidney dysfunction, in children under nine years and in pregnant women. The medication is administered for seven to ten days.