The Telegraph reported the information.Ukrainian medics and foreign volunteers are reporting a spike in the rare, flesh-destroying infection, a complication they attribute directly to the new realities of modern warfare.Relentless Russian drone surveillance has made evacuations from the frontlines a deadly, hours- or even weeks-long ordeal. This delay creates the perfect conditions for the lethal bacteria to thrive in traumatic wounds, leading to complications long thought relegated to history.“We are seeing injury complications that have never been seen by any living person in wartime,” said Alex, a foreign volunteer medic in the Zaporizhzhia area. “These types of delayed evacuation times have never been seen in the last 50 years – probably since the Second World War, and maybe not even that.”Gas gangrene, caused mainly by Clostridium bacteria, destroys muscle tissue at an alarming rate, producing gas bubbles beneath the skin. It requires the oxygen-deprived environment of deep, necrotic blast or shrapnel wounds—and, crucially, a delay in medical care.“Gas gangrene is something you learn about in school… In Ukraine, though, you see it, because people are sitting with these types of wounds and not getting proper care – you simply can’t move them back to a hospital fast enough to treat them properly,” Alex said.Medics are forced to perform "damage control surgery" in makeshift underground bunkers and basements, the only places safe from drones.“If you step out into the open, you will be killed by a drone. That’s not an exaggeration,” Alex noted.These non-sterile facilities are ill-equipped for the complex care needed. “We have people coming into the hospital who’ve been injured for a couple of weeks, just sitting at underground stabilisation points, being kept alive as best we can,” Alex stated.The infection is notoriously difficult to treat, requiring aggressive surgical removal of infected flesh and massive doses of antibiotics. “It’s an extremely life-threatening infection: left untreated, the mortality rate is close to 100 per cent,” said Dr. Lindsey Edwards, a Senior Lecturer in Microbiology at King’s College London.This crisis is compounded by a "huge uptick in antibiotic resistance," according to Alex, making treatment even more challenging.Historically, gas gangrene's prevalence fell sharply after WWI due to antibiotics and, most importantly, rapid evacuation and surgery.“Historically, it’s thought of as a World War One–era phenomenon," explained Mr. Alastair Beaven, an orthopaedic consultant and military medical officer. "[It] became much rarer, largely because of early wound debridement, timely surgery, antibiotics, and better wound management."Today in Ukraine, those life-saving measures are often impossible. Medics report that highly skilled surgical teams wait in rear hospitals, but patients cannot reach them. The delays, measured in hours and days, are costing lives.“We’re seeing more people with injuries that should be survivable – amputations, for example, or cases where someone just needs a blood transfusion – who are dying in the field,” said Alex. “So many of them can’t be evacuated in time, and they simply don’t make it.”