Some Gunners Get Fever

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31113, 16 July 1966, Page 22

Some Gunners Get Fever

(N.Z. Press Assn. —Copyright) BARIA (Phuoc Tuy Province), July 14.

A mysterious fever which can put people in hospital for several days is one of the major sickness problems of the New Zealand Battery in South Vietnam.

“There is no accounting for it. The men just get it and it can put them out for 24 hours or three to four days,” Sergeant J. Benyon, a medical orderly, said today. He said there had been many cases in the battery. Men had been admitted to hospital with the fever, tests had been made for illnesses, including malaria, but no reason or cause for the outbreaks could be found. Over-all, however, the battery had been very lucky with health, considering the tropical diseases and poisonous pests which abounded in the country. “We have had some scorpion stings. They are very, very painful, but not fatal;” The men had to be very careful about cuts, scratches and grazes that would be regarded as nothing in New Zealand, he said. In the tropical conditions these could soon fester into painful injuries. One man who walked into a tent rope grazed his leg through his trousers slightly. But the trousers, washed by a local washerwoman in the local unclean water, spread germs into the slight graze. In a few days it was a bad sore.

In spite of the heat, the men never go barefoot The earth has thousands of microbes that can cause painful sores and diseases on the flesh. One, known as the creeping eruption, is caused by a tiny worm that eats into the foot and burrows along under the skin, leaving behind a passage of pus. Skin diseases are a big problem in the heat. Exces-

sive sweating and prickly heat rash are the most common of these. When they are not on operations, the men do not wear shirts around the battery during the day. Many military units in the country are not allowed to do this, but the New Zealanders —many of whom have dark tans —say the sunlight has helped enormously in clearing up skin diseases and sores.

Most of the gunners developed slight diarrhoea when they entered the theatre but there had been no cases of the serious amoebic dysentery, said Sergeant Benyon. Particular precautions are taken against malaria. The men have to wear shirts with the sleeves down at dusk and apply insect repellant if they are not under mosquito nets. Everyone takes two tablets of

a malaria-suppressing drug daily. Before they return home and the end of their term they undergo a course on a malaria cure drug. The battery has so far avoided the disease.