Typhoid fever made its appearance, and a proper statistical investigation should be made later on to show the extent of the damage done. The general impression respecting the result of the inoculation to which all the troops were subjected was that the disease was not so frequent and certainly not nearly so fatal as it otherwise would have been. Deaths were few.
The men had not been inoculated against paratyphoid, so that exact conclusions will be difficult to draw even when figures become available.
Many people suffered from Egyptian stomach ache, a form of disease which is as unpleasant as it is exhausting. It manifests itself by repeated attacks of colicky pain, apparently usually associated with the colon. The severity of the pains is remarkable, and the persistent recurrence speedily ends in a considerable degree of exhaustion. It is almost certainly due to food infection.
It is obvious that the business of a sanitary medical officer is not merely to inspect buildings and kitchens, but to spend an hour or two a day in the kitchen quietly watching the preparation of the food and giving the necessary instruction and supervision to those who are preparing it. The inefficiency caused by food infections has probably done more harm than many battles. In the camps similar troubles occurred. By reason of the lack of cold storage and the high temperature, rotten food was not uncommon, and caused outbreaks of incapacitating diarrhoea and ptomaine poisoning.
When, however, the problem is surveyed dispassionately, the remarkable feature of the work at Heliopolis and in Cairo was the low mortality, as the following table will show:
_From Arrival of Australians in Egypt, December 5, 1914, to August 14, 1915_
British Imperial Force 77 Australian Imperial Force 155 New Zealand Force 50
In view of this extraordinarily low mortality, it is interesting to comment on human intellectual frailty. It was said that the hospitals were septic, that operations of election could not be performed with safety, that the climate was particularly dangerous, and so forth. One letter which reached us made reference to hundreds of deaths of brave fellows due to faulty camp and hospital conditions. Yet here is the fact recorded that the total deaths in Cairo amongst Australians from disease and wounds to August 14 were only 155. All men tend to generalise on insufficient instances, and the tendency in this case was aggravated by some physical discomfort experienced by the generalisers throughout an unusually warm summer--a discomfort accentuated by overwork and a conscientious devotion to duty under trying conditions.
