Trench fever

Trench fever (also known as "five-day fever", "quintan fever" (febris quintana in Latin), and "urban trench fever") is a moderately serious disease transmitted by body lice. It infected armies in Flanders, France, Poland, Galicia, Italy, Salonika, Macedonia, Mesopotamia, and Egypt in World War I (three noted sufferers being the authors J.R.R. Tolkien, A. A. Milne, and C.S. Lewis), and the German army in Russia during World War I. 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.