Army officials admitted the service doesn't know as much as it should about its soldiers' personal hygiene in the field even after Army programs have created antimicrobial treatments for socks and shirts.
The Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center wants to change that. In response, the center's Consumer Research Team issued a survey for soldiers to figure how soldiers combat common afflictions in the field like jock itch, athlete's foot and body odor.
The Army wants to know what works and what doesn't so it can better develop future solutions for items like sleeping bag liners, t-shirts, socks and boots.
Here is a link to the survey although a computer connected to a CAC identification is required to open and fill it out.
"Currently, the military doesn't have any requirements for (antimicrobial treatments)," said Wendy Johnson of the Consumer Research Team. "And so the question is, should the military have requirements? What should they be? How do we know that this stuff is good enough, is doing what it's supposed to do?"
Johnson did make a puzzling comment later in the survey announcement.
"We think that some of these things are going to get very low incidence rates, so we want thousands of Soldiers to answer this questionnaire for us," Johnson said in the press release.
I don't know too many soldiers who haven't faced some of these ailments on a deployment or a field exercise.
