ReviewThe Lancet. Infectious diseases2016
The centenary of the discovery of trench fever, an emerging infectious disease of World War 1.
Review in The Lancet. Infectious diseases, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 33 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
33 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 75 citations in OpenAlex.
- Pooled it
- Bartonella quintana detection among arthropods and their hosts: a systematic review and meta-analysis.Parasites & vectors · 2024Pooled it
- Atatürk's kidney disease: pyelonephritis or trench nephritis? A medical and historical analysis.BMC nephrology · 2026Review
- Validation of a High-Throughput Microfluidic Real-Time PCR for the Detection of Vector-Borne Agents in Wild Birds from the Brazilian Pantanal.Pathogens (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Napoleon Bonaparte-A Possible Case of Trench Fever.Emerging infectious diseases · 2025Article
- Bartonella quintana Endocarditis and Pauci-Immune Glomerulonephritis in Patient with Known Risk Factors, USA, 2024.Emerging infectious diseases · 2025Article
- Article
- Not to lose control of war: narrative review of military louse control in the first half of XX Century.Le infezioni in medicina · 2025Article
- Bartonella quintana Endocarditis in Persons Experiencing Homelessness, New York, New York, USA, 2020-2023.Emerging infectious diseases · 2024Article
- Homelessness and Organ Donor-Derived Bartonella quintana Infection.Emerging infectious diseases · 2024Review
- Secondary Bacterial Infections in Patients with Atopic Dermatitis or Other Common Dermatoses.American journal of clinical dermatology · 2024Review
- Evaluation of the available animal models forOne health (Amsterdam, Netherlands) · 2024Review
- Molecular evidence of Bartonella spp. in tropical wild birds from the Brazilian Pantanal, the largest wetland in South America.Veterinary research communications · 2024Article
- Molecular Prevalence, Genetic Diversity, and Tissue Tropism ofAnimals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Article
- Case report: A case of blood culture-negativeFrontiers in medicine · 2024Article
- Evidence forPathogens (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Development and validation of a real-time PCR test to detect Bartonella quintana in clinical samples.Diagnostic microbiology and infectious disease · 2023Article
- Genome Analysis of ST1Infection and drug resistance · 2023Article
- A Historical Review of Military Medical Strategies for Fighting Infectious Diseases: From Battlefields to Global Health.Biomedicines · 2022Review
- Molecular detection and genetic characterization of small rodents associated Bartonella species in Zhongtiao Mountain, China.PloS one · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In 1915, a British medical officer on the Western Front reported on a soldier with relapsing fever, headache, dizziness, lumbago, and shin pain. Within months, additional cases were described, mostly in frontline troops, and the new disease was called trench fever. More than 1 million troops were infected with trench fever during World War 1, with each affected soldier unfit for duty for more than 60 days. Diagnosis was challenging, because there were no pathognomonic signs and symptoms and the causative organism could not be cultured. For 3 years, the transmission and cause of trench fever were hotly debated. In 1918, two commissions identified that the disease was louse-borne. The bacterium Rickettsia quintana was consistently found in the gut and faeces of lice that had fed on patients with trench fever and its causative role was accepted in the 1920s. The organism was cultured in the 1960s and reclassified as Bartonella quintana; it was also found to cause endocarditis, peliosis hepatis, and bacillary angiomatosis. Subsequently, B quintana infection has been identified in new populations in the Andes, in homeless people in urban areas, and in individuals with HIV. The story of trench fever shows how war can lead to the recrudescence of an infectious disease and how medicine approached an emerging infection a century ago.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.