Biological Warfare: Flesh Eating Disease Sweeping Across Iraq/Syria

I do not know about you but when I hear ‘flesh eating disease sweeping its way through a country’ my mind goes to zombie apocalypse. The science fiction aside this is an extremely important issue to bring to attention. For those of you living under a rock you might not have known there have been a few Wars in Iraq and Syria the last few years.  According the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights there have been nearly 240,000 casualties of the Syrian War conflicts since the War began in 2011. According to the PLOS Medical Journal the number of people who have died in Iraq since 2001 is estimated to be around 500,000.

In War torn, poverty stricken areas with little if any organized access to state resources there is no real efficient way to dispose of all the bodies. When over 3/4 million corpses start spreading out over a geographic area in a short time, it is not hard to imagine how problems like this arise. As a result of the poor sanitary conditions and the improper disposal of dead bodies it has been reported for over a week now by multiple sources that a rare form of flesh eating disease has been sweeping its way through Iraq and Syria.

That is about as graphic as we will get with this article. A quick google search of the word Leishmaniasis will give you all the gore you want. The disease is said to be spread by sand flies in the region which travel from areas where the flies have had contact with/feed around dead bodies. It is estimated that since 2013 there have been over 100,000 reported cases of leishmaniasis. There have been over 500 reports visceral leishmaniasis, the most severe for disease, reported in Syria just within the last 12 months.With the multitude of media reports coming out over this issue it appears this problem/disease is only growing.

According to  the World Health Organization nearly 90% cases of leishmaniasis will result in death if left untreated. The W.H.O. also estimates that nearly 310 million people are at risk of contracting the disease in the region and as it stands today there are nearly 13 million people in need to urgent medical care in Syria right now but do not have access to it.

In a tactic stolen out of the middle ages a Kurdish newspaper out of Syria reports that ISIS soldiers are engaging a in a from of biological warfare by dumping dead bodies in the streets in an effort to spread disease: http://rudaw.net/english/middleeast/syria/02122015

As a result of this behavior a significant population ISIS fighters themselves has been heavily hit by the disease: http://www.miragenews.com/isis-run-area-hit-by-outbreak-of-flesh-eating-skin-disease/

This whole conversations of dead bodies spreading disease and fear of biological terror attacks brings to mind what happened in Western Africa during the Ebola outbreaks: http://www.msf.ca/en/ebola

The CDC has its own tutorial on how to dispose of dead bodies infected with Ebola. If it is effective at stopping the transmitting of Ebola in Africa the practice can be helpful in preventing the spread of leishmaniasis in Iraq and Syria: http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/healthcare-us/hospitals/handling-human-remains.html

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