Just like Walter Reed

last updated 8 January 2015

London

Wounded American vets aren’t the only ones receiving shoddy medical care, British media reported this week. Amid reports of horrid conditions at many American military hospitals, the family of one British soldier, Jamie Cooper, wrote to the London Observer complaining that the 18-year-old contracted a potentially deadly infection after being left all night in his own feces in a hospital room. The Independent on Sunday reported that more than 21,000 veterans of the Iraq conflict were suffering from anxiety and depression. And the Sunday Times said some of those dealing with mental illness were waiting up to 18 months for treatment. The British military’s surgeon general, Lt. Gen. Louis Lillywhite, defended the treatment of veterans. A survey of patients in one military hospital ward, he said, found that “all rated their treatment as excellent, very good, or good.”