Say Anything Blog

Touristas in Mexico call it Montezuma’s Revenge. Improperly treated water is a problem I was taught to remedy in Basic Training. Why is our military dependent upon civilian contractors for such basic necessities? Whose brilliant idea was stripping them of their ability to operate in the field under less than optimum conditions?

With the plethora of water filtering and treatment systems available on the open market today, why the hell is this happening?

Una Salus Victus Nullam Sperare Salutem

From November’s Vanity Fair:

It is not unheard of for trucks in a war zone to perform hearse duty. But both civilian and U.S.-military regulations state that once a trailer has been used to store corpses it can never again be loaded with food or drink intended for human consumption. According to the U.S. Army’s Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine, “Contact with whole or part human remains carries potential risks associated with pathogenic microbiological organisms that may be present in human blood and tissue.” The diseases that may be communicated include aids, hepatitis, tuberculosis, septicemia, meningitis, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human variant of mad cow.

But when Bud Conyers next caught sight of trailer R-89, about a month later, it was packed not with human casualties but with bags of ice-ice that was going into drinks served to American troops. He took photographs, showing the ice bags, the trailer number, and the wooden decking, which appeared to be stained red. Another former KBR employee, James Logsdon, who now works as a police officer near Enid, says he first saw R-89 about a week after Conyers’s grisly discovery. “You could still see a little bit of matter from the bodies, stuff that looked kind of pearly, and blood from the stomachs. It hadn’t even been hosed down. Afterwards, I saw that truck in the P.W.C.-the public warehouse center-several times. There’s nothing there except food and ice. It was backed up to a dock, being loaded.”

As late as August 31, 11 weeks after trailer R-89 was emptied of the putrefying bodies, a KBR convoy commander named Jeff Allen filed a mission log stating that it had carried 5,000 pounds of ice that day. This ice, Allen wrote, was “bio-contaminated.” But to his horror, on that day alone, “approx 1,800 pounds [were] used.”

“Behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil… a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unision.” - Milan Kundera

As I mentioned over on RBBs original post, blackwater refers to untreated sewage.  There’s also a reference to blackwater fever that is dated in 2002 in Wikipedia.

Reporters are stupid.

2H9

No - blackwater fever has been around forever where there is endemic Plasmodium falciparium malaria. It is a usually rare complication so named because hemoglobin from destroyed red blood cells turns urine dark. The same thing can happen when people with G6PD deficiency are given primaquine to treat malaria. Contrary to the “UN Briefing” mentioned in the Readers Entries, it has nothing to do with leishmaniasis, which is transmitted by sand flies, not water.

The issue is the media, as usual, getting it all wrong and conflating a known condition, with the contractor.

Eingang Ausfahrt is correct about the origins of the word.  It goes back at least to the early 18th century.

I had briefly considered the idea that “blackwater” might refer to swamp water, but I’m pretty sure that’s a Southern colloquialism.

Ein, I have read 3 different articles on this today, and apparently people are lumping together multiple water-borne illnesses. As you say, “journalists” once again getting it wrong.

Hairy brings in another angle, unsanitary practices in transport of water/ice and foodstuffs. And you can bet your bippy their kitchens are none to clean, either.

And yes, primaquine makes dark nasty smelling urine! I have been treated for malaria and it ain’t no picnic.

Una Salus Victus Nullam Sperare Salutem

A simple Wiki search will yield a British Medical Journal publication with the same “Blackwater Fever” in a 1988 edition of the journal.

Indeed.

The Google Fu of the usual suspects [MSM, rbb, etc.] remains weak…

Out Here
Rodney G. Graves

Ceterum censeo Parthia esse delendam
Latin: “Furthermore, Parthia (Persia aka modern day Iran) should be destoyed”

A search of the New York Times achieves produces an article from 1922, which discusses “Blackwater Fever” in the “Panama Canal Zone”.

Article: DENIES BLACKWATER FEVER (pdf format)