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* By the fair play rules of acronyms, this should be TEAT TD. Never mind, though. It’s hard enough for diarrhea researchers to get the respect they deserve without bringing teats on board.
? Here is my diarrhea research statistic: When you are communicating with a pair of diarrhea researchers named Riddle and Tribble, there is a 94 percent chance you are going to slip up and refer to one or both of them as Dribble.
? Full name: the Dorie Miller Galley. It is unusual for the military to use a nickname when naming a facility after one of its own. When the man’s full name is Doris, an exception is eagerly made. Doris “Dorie” Miller was a cook who showed commendable bravery during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, so commendable that his name appears on twenty-three government and civic facilities, eight opting for “Dorie” and fifteen—including the US Postal Service—embracing the full Doris. The US Navy named a frigate after Doris Miller. Since most frigates omit first names, the Doris issue was easily skirted, or pantsed.
§ The dose makes the poison. In small amounts, a mimic of the cholera/ETEC toxin is an effective treatment for constipation (in particular, the constipation that afflicts a third of irritable bowel syndrome sufferers). In 2012, Ironwood Pharmaceuticals released a synthetic version that was promptly forecast by one pharmaceutical market researcher to achieve “blockbuster status,” and what could be more fitting for a constipation drug?
? I tried, but I cannot tell you who decided how much toilet paper to include in MREs, or how. But I can tell you a lot of other things about the TP, because I found the federal specifications, ASTM D-3905. I can tell you the required tensile strength, wet and dry. I can tell you the colors it’s allowed to come in (white, dull beige, yellow, green), the minimum grammage and basis weight, the percentage of postconsumer fiber, the required speed of water absorption. And maybe that’s our answer right there. Because if your anus is as securely clamped as the anus of whoever is in charge of “toilet tissue used as a component of operations rations,” ASTM D-3905, you probably don’t need much.
# Other bases require this at 4:30 or 5:00 p.m., when the flag is taken in. When the music begins playing, you stop what you’re doing and face the flag. I was at Natick Labs when this happened. Without explanation, my hosts stopped talking, turned, and solemnly faced a display model of a new containerized latrine standing in the sight lines of the flag. Having heard about the horrors of open-bay toileting, it seemed wholly appropriate for us to direct some respect, however unintended, to the Expeditionary Tricon Latrine System.
** Tips for hole-living: Double-bag your peanut butter sandwiches in gallon Ziplocs, as the bags serve double-duty as the toilet. Bring cat litter to put in the bags in case diarrhea strikes, which it does reliably enough that the man who told me this, an air strike controller just back from Niger, was confronted by his commander wanting to know why Special Operations Command was requisitioning kitty litter.
?? The clean-shaving rule began with the gas attacks of World War I. Whiskers compromise the airtight seal of a gas mask. (Special Operators are exempt because they may need to blend in with bearded Muslim locals, and because they’re Special.) There were also some hygiene concerns. In 1967, the Department of the Army undertook an investigation entitled “Microbiological Laboratory Hazard of Bearded Men.” To see whether bearded sixties bio-warfare lab workers might be putting their family members at risk via “intimate contact,” the researchers fashioned some human hair beards, contaminated them with deadly pathogens, and attached them to manikin heads. The heads then became intimate with some chicks. “Each of three 6-week-old chickens was held with its head alternately nestled in the beard and stroked across one-third of the beard (one chicken on each side and one on the chin).” When the beards were washed according to lab safety protocol, none of the nine chicks exposed to the highest concentration of the virus became infected. The heads with unwashed beards, however, transmitted deadly disease to the chicks with whom they’d been intimate. The chicks died, and the heads were never really the same after that.
?? Dale Smith, a historian of military medicine at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, is dubious. Bollet, he says, drew the conclusion from one man’s story. Certainly no such etiquette prevails among military historians, who take any opportunity to shoot each other down.
§§ How did Mexico become the poster child for travelers’ diarrhea? One hypothesis, mine, points a finger at the godfather of diarrhea research, Herbert DuPont. For almost thirty years, DuPont ran studies out of Guadalajara, Mexico. If you plug “Guadalajara” and “diarrhea” into the PubMed database, you get forty-five journal articles and a persuasive argument for changing your holiday destination to Switzerland. (“Enteric pathogens in Mexican sauces in popular restaurants in Guadalajara . . .”; “Coliform contamination of vegetables obtained from popular restaurants in Guadalajara . . .”; “Coliform and E. coli contamination of desserts served in public restaurants in Guadalajara . . .”)
There has been at least one well-intentioned effort to clear Mexico’s name. The author of a paper in California Medicine had read that Mexicans often get travelers’ diarrhea when they visit California. She wondered if perhaps the stress of travel, rather than poor sanitation, was to blame. She interviewed 215 foreign UCLA freshmen and 238 American freshmen about “changes in frequency and consistency of stools.” None of the foreign students appeared to have had travelers’ diarrhea, though it was difficult to tell because many “did not understand the interviewer’s terms.” You can see where “watery stool” or “explosive diarrhea” might be confusing, frightening even, for the non-native speaker.
The Maggot Paradox
Flies on the battlefield, for better and worse