AFGHANISTAN: British military airlifted six of its medical personnel out of Afghanistan yesterday after they fell ill to an apparently contagious infection of the stomach.
No new cases of the disease were reported yesterday after 18 people working at a field hospital in the Bagram air base came down with diarrhoea, vomiting and fever. Two were evacuated earlier this week.
"This has all the characteristics of gastro-intenstinal . . . disease," Britain's junior Defence Minister, Mr Lewis Moonie, told the BBC.
The field hospital has been closed down and some 333 people who worked there and in the vicinity have been quarantined.
Britain has deployed about 1,700 soldiers from the Royal Marines and almost all are in Bagram, the headquarters of the US-led coalition now hunting for remnants of the al-Qaeda and Taliban in the Afghan mountains.
Asked if he thought it could have been a biological attack on the elite British troops, Mr Moonie said: "The thinking is that such an attack would be most unlikely." None of the other coalition forces, including the biggest US contingent, have reported any outbreak of disease among troops deployed in the harsh Afghan terrain.
"It could be food-borne, it could have been picked up from one of the other people they have been nursing. It is hard to say yet as we haven't been able to isolate the cause," the minister said.
The British have had no contact with the enemy, but the unidentified disease underlines the health risks involved in working in the punishing climate and environment of Afghanistan, risks which proved the ultimate conqueror of the Soviet forces during their ill-fated invasion in the 1980s.
"We are encouraged by the fact there are no additional cases over the past 22 hours," Lieut-Col Ben Curry, the spokesman of the Royal Marines, said.
"In order to be sure, we are looking at as far as 72 hours," he said when asked if the disease had been contained. "We don't know what we are dealing with . . . it is like an infection in the gut, akin to gastro-enteritis."
During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, about two-thirds of the soldiers were hospitalised for disease or non-battle injuries, most of which were preventable, according to British doctors.
US military officials said they were keeping a close eye on their troops for an outbreak of any disease.
There are some 4,500 coalition soldiers at Bagram, a decrepit base north of Kabul which the Soviet forces also used.
The British minister said the defence ministry would be looking at whether changes needed to be made to conditions in which troops were living, particularly lavatory arrangements.
"When you get an incident like this you always review what you're doing and you always try to learn lessons from it and we'll certainly be doing that in this case," he said.
The marines, trained for high altitude and extreme weather conditions, completed a sweep of the mountains in eastern Afghanistan last week which failed to find any enemy.
Col Curry said the outbreak of the disease would not have any impact on operational duties. "We are now in a phase of rest and recuperation and re-engineering our assets," he said.