Cholera
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Cholera Microchapters |
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Cholera On the Web |
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American Roentgen Ray Society Images of Cholera |
Editor-In-Chief: C. Michael Gibson, M.S., M.D. [1]
Overview
History & Symptoms
Treatment
Dietary Management | Medical Therapy
Epidemiology & Demographics
Primary Prevention
Risk Factors
Lab Tests
Pathophysiology
Historical perspective
Future or Investigational Therapies
The major contributions to fighting cholera were made by physician and self-trained scientist John Snow (1813-1858), who found the link between cholera and contaminated drinking water in 1854 and Henry Whitehead, an Anglican minister, who helped John Snow track down and verify the source of the disease, an infected well in London. Their conclusions and writings were widely distributed and firmly established for the first time a definite link between germs and disease. Clean water and good sewage treatment, despite their major engineering and financial cost, slowly became a priority throughout the major developed cities in the world from this time onward. Robert Koch, 30 years later, identified V. cholerae with a microscope as the bacillus causing the disease in 1885. The bacterium had been originally isolated thirty years earlier (1855) by Italian anatomist Filippo Pacini, but its exact nature and his results were not widely known around the world.
Cholera has been a laboratory for the study of evolution of virulence. The province of Bengal in British India was partitioned into West Bengal (a state in India) and East Pakistan in 1947. Prior to partition, both regions had cholera pathogens with similar characteristics. After 1947, India made more progress on public health than East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). As a consequence, the strains of the pathogen which succeeded in India had a greater incentive in the longevity of the host and are less virulent than the strains prevailing in Bangladesh, which uninhibitedly draw upon the resources of the host population, thus rapidly killing many in it.
False report of cholera
A persistent myth states that 90,000 people died in Chicago of cholera and typhoid fever in 1885. This story has no factual basis. In 1885 there was a torrential rainstorm that flushed the Chicago river and its attendant pollutants into Lake Michigan far enough that the city's water supply was contaminated. Fortunately, cholera was not present in the city and this is not known to have caused any deaths. It did, however, cause the city to become more serious about their sewage treatment.
Cholera morbus
The term cholera morbus was used in the 19th and early 20th century to describe both non-epidemic cholera and gastrointestinal diseases that mimicked cholera. The term is not in current use, but is found in many older references.[1]
References
External links
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Wikimedia Commons has media related to Cholera. |
- Cholera - World Health Organization
- What is Cholera? - Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
- Cholera information for travelers - Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
- Steven Shapin, "Sick City: Maps and mortality in the time of cholera", The New Yorker May 2006. A review of Steven Johnson, “The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic — and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World”
- short paper contrasting official responses to cholera in Hamburg, Soho and New York.
- Kelley Lee and Richard Dogson, "Globalization and Cholera: implications for global governance." in Global Governance, 6:2 (Apr-June 2000)
- Nashville's cholera outbreak, Summer 1873