Parasites plagued Roman soldiers at Hadrian’s Wall

It probably sucked to be a Roman soldier guarding Hadrian’s Wall circa the third century CE. W.H. Auden imagined the likely harsh conditions in his poem “Roman Wall Blues,” in which a soldier laments enduring wet wind and rain with “lice in my tunic and a cold in my nose.” We can now add chronic nausea and bouts of diarrhea to his list of likely woes, thanks to parasitic infections, according to a new paper published in the journal…