Health Notes: Monkey bites a problem for troops in Afghanistan

Among all the challenges facing our troops in Afghanistan, who would think of monkey bites?

But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tells us that in just four months, 10 service members in Afghanistan were bitten by monkeys. The incidents were examined by the U.S. Army and reported in the October 2012 issue of the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.

A CDC summary of the article said that most of the monkeys involved were pets owned by Afghan National Security Forces and Afghan civilians.

Monkey bites can spread rabies, tetanus or other bacterial infections as well as B-virus infection to humans, the CDC reports. Bites can be minimized by enforcing military policies that prohibit pet adoption and animal contact, and secondary infections can be reduced by providing better training to military health-care providers on how to treat animal bites, the article’s authors concluded.

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