Why did poor food rations make prisoners on the Burma Railway vulnerable to disease?

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Map showing the height of Japanese territorial expansion in 1942 during World War II, with a large hatched area covering much of East and Southeast Asia and the western Pacific, including parts of China, Korea, Southeast Asia, the Philippines, and numerous Pacific islands. Japan's home islands are shaded in solid red, while the expansion area stretches from India and Burma in the west to the Aleut — Burma Railway In World War II Japanese military forces quickly took advantage of their success at Pearl Harbor to expand their holdings throughout the Pacific and westward toward India. This expansion continued relatively unchecked until mid-1942. Then, after losing the Battle of Midway, Japan was forced on the defensive.

During the construction of the Burma Railway, prisoners were provided with grossly inadequate food, typically consisting of small portions of boiled rice and spoiled meat or fish that were often contaminated with rat droppings and maggots.

This severe lack of nutrition, combined with a shortage of potable water, left prisoners malnourished and dehydrated. These conditions significantly weakened their physical health, making them highly predisposed to illness. When compounded by the unsanitary state of the work camps and the surrounding tropical environment, these nutritional deficiencies allowed diseases such as dysentery, diarrhea, cholera, malaria, and tropical ulcers to become rampant among the workforce.1