Medics warn of “WWI-era” disease spreading in trenches in Ukraine

Military medics speaking to The Telegraph described a sharp increase in cases linked to long delays in transporting injured fighters.

Alex, a foreign volunteer medic working near Zaporizhzhia, said they were treating complications that no current medical generation had ever encountered.

“We are seeing injury complications that have never been seen by any living person in wartime,” he told the newspaper.

And some of the complications stem from a disease called gas gangrene.

Echoes of old wars

Historians associate gas gangrene with the First World War, when soldiers fought in muddy trenches contaminated with manure-rich soil carrying Clostridium spores.

Serious battlefield injuries and slow evacuations made the infection widespread during that period, long before antibiotics became available.

Mr Alastair Beaven, an orthopaedic consultant and Medical Officer with 202 Field Hospital who served in Afghanistan, told The Telegraph that modern medical systems largely eliminated the condition through rapid surgery and antibiotic access.

All of those measures require significant ressources, though.

The Second World War saw fatalities fall dramatically after antibiotics were introduced, a progress now under threat in Ukraine’s current battlefield conditions.

How the infection spreads

Gas gangrene occurs when Clostridium bacteria multiply in oxygen-starved tissue, eating through muscle and releasing pockets of gas under the skin.

The illness differs from more common forms of gangrene, which usually develop slowly and without toxin-producing microbes.

In Ukraine, deep blast wounds and gunshot injuries often go untreated for extended periods, creating ideal conditions for the bacteria to take hold.

Alex told The Telegraph, that patients routinely arrive after days or even weeks in makeshift underground stabilisation points.

“Gas gangrene is something you learn about in school… In Ukraine, though, you see it, because people are sitting with these types of wounds and not getting proper care – you simply can’t move them back to a hospital fast enough to treat them properly,” he said.

Treatment hurdles

Even in well-resourced hospitals, gas gangrene demands urgent surgery to remove infected tissue alongside strong intravenous antibiotics.

“It’s an extremely life-threatening infection: left untreated, the mortality rate is close to 100 per cent,” said Dr Lindsey Edwards, Senior Lecturer in Microbiology at King’s College London, speaking to The Telegraph.

But field medics in Ukraine often lack laboratory access, restricting their ability to identify the bacteria or test for drug resistance.

Dr Edwards explains that you would normally screen the microbes, cultures them and use other methods to spot any drug resistance, but in a field hospital, none of that is possible.

Under siege underground

According to Alex, surgical teams must focus on “damage control” procedures — rapidly addressing only the most urgent wounds in the first two days after injury.

He said many facilities lack sterile environments, and delivery convoys are regularly targeted by enemy drones.

Repeated delays mean patients arrive at hospitals with severe tissue damage and infections already spreading.

Mr Beaven warned that the longer surgeons wait, the fewer options remain for reconstruction.

Alex said teams of surgeons often stand by for hours awaiting casualties who cannot be moved through drone-watched terrain.

Human cost

When he spoke to The Telegraph, patient evacuations were already trailing by eight hours.

The consequences, he said, are stark: wounds that should be survivable are instead becoming fatal.

“We’re seeing more people with injuries that should be survivable – amputations, for example, or cases where someone just needs a blood transfusion – who are dying in the field,” Alex said.

Sources: The Telegraph

This article is made and published by Jens Asbjørn Bogen, who may have used AI in the preparation