Napoleon's soldiers who died in Russian retreat had unexpected diseases, study finds

"When Napoleon ordered his army to retreat from Russia in October 1812, disaster ensued. Starving, cold, exhausted and struggling with sickness, an estimated 300,000 soldiers died. Researchers now say they have identified two unexpected diseases among soldiers who died in the retreat paratyphoid fever and relapsing fever which provide fresh insights into their plight. I think that the key thing of why [the retreat] was such a failure was the cold and the hunger and so on."

"Using a different technique, called shotgun sequencing, Rascovan's team was able to look for fragments of DNA that matched any out of 185 bacteria known to cause disease in humans. The results, based on DNA from the teeth of 13 soldiers who had not previously been studied, revealed one soldier had been infected with the louse-borne bacterium Borrelia recurrentis, which causes relapsing fever, and four others had been infected with a type of the bacterium Salmonella enterica, which causes paratyphoid fever."

Napoleon's retreat from Russia in October 1812 resulted in an estimated 300,000 soldier deaths from starvation, cold, exhaustion, and sickness. DNA analysis of teeth from 13 soldiers in a Vilnius mass grave detected one infection with Borrelia recurrentis (relapsing fever) and four infections with Salmonella enterica (paratyphoid fever), with one individual possibly co-infected. Prior targeted analyses of the same grave had identified typhus and trench fever. Shotgun sequencing screened for matches among 185 human-pathogenic bacteria and produced results consistent with historical reports of fever and diarrhoea among retreating soldiers.

Read at www.theguardian.com