Military Medicine: An Everlasting War against Tropical and Infectious Diseases

Dear Colleagues,

For centuries, military medicine has always provided significant scientific contributions to tropical medicine and infectious diseases, Alphonse Laveran, Edmond and Etienne Sergent, Ronald Ross, and Alan Magill for malaria, Walter Reed and William Gorgas for yellow fever, William Leishman for leishmaniasis, Léon Lapeyssonnie for the African meningitis belt, Fabrice Simon for Chikungunya, and Eugène Jamot for African Trypanosomiasis, just to cite a few. Despite major advances in hygiene, sanitation, drugs, vaccines, and infection control, infectious diseases still represent approximately 40% of ailments in deployed troops, as these preventive measures can become neglected over time or disrupted during early or most intense stages of military operations. The emergence of novel microorganisms, new variants, antimicrobial resistance, insecticide resistance, climate change, reemerging infectious diseases, as well as the introduction of new microorganisms into new geographic areas due the exponential increase of travel do not make us foresee a substantial improvement in the near future. Moreover, conflicts are still erupting in tropical areas where deployed military healthcare providers are faced with major diagnostic and management difficulties in remote and resource-limited settings with reduced medical evacuation possibilities. In this context, thorough history-taking and clinical examination, as well as the use of rapid diagnostic tests, are critical. As a consequence, recent advances in molecular biology, such as point-of-care multiplex PCR, will surely improve the identification of causative microorganisms in diarrhea or undifferentiated febrile illnesses for instance. In order to facilitate medical support of deployed troops, updates in the epidemiology, prevention, and treatment of tropical and infectious diseases as well as simple management charts are mostly needed. I thus encourage my military colleagues to submit reviews, meta-analyses, and original research regarding the latest data on tropical medicine and infectious diseases.

Dr. Olivier Aoun
Guest Editor

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• military
• malaria
• leishmaniasis
• schistosomiasis
• rabies
• sexually transmitted infections
• skin diseases
• antimicrobial resistance