Cholera history and symptoms
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Editor-In-Chief: C. Michael Gibson, M.S., M.D. [2]
Overview
Choleria is a severe bacterial gastrointestinal, diarrheal disease. In its most severe forms, cholera is one of the most rapidly fatal illnesses known. A healthy person may become hypotensive within an hour of the onset of symptoms and may die within 2-3 hours if no treatment is provided. More commonly, the disease progresses from the first liquid stool to shock in 4-12 hours, with death following in 18 hours to several days without rehydration treatment.[1][2]
History and symptoms
History
- Patient may give a history of consumption of contaminated food or water.
- Symptoms usually develop 24-48 hours of consumption.
- Recent travel to a cholera endemic area may be present.
Symptoms
Diarrhea
- Sudden onset
- Painless
- Odorless
- Watery consistency (initially it may have some fecal matter but with disease progression it is mostly watery)
- It is pale white in color and thus sometimes referred as 'Rice water stool'(this is so because it has similar color and consistency as water left after washing stool)
- Voluminous (stool volume during cholera is more than that of any other infectious diarrhea causing uncontrolled bowel movements). An untreated person with cholera may produce 10–20 litres of diarrhea a day with fatal results.
- Abdominal cramp (due to large volume of intestinal secretion)
- For every symptomatic person, three to 100 people get the infection but remain asymptomatic.[3]
Vomiting
- Causes for vomiting are decreased intestinal motility and acidemia
Muscle cramp
- If the severe diarrhea and vomiting are not aggressively treated, they can, within hours, result in life-threatening dehydration and electrolyte imbalances. The typical symptoms of dehydration include dizziness ( due to low blood pressure), (wrinkled hands) (poor skin turgor) , sunken eyes, mucle cramps (decreased potassium), and decreased urine output.
- Cholera has been nicknamed the "blue death" due to a patient's skin turning a bluish-gray hue from extreme loss of fluids.[4]
Fever
- Fever is usually absent.
References
- ↑ McLeod K (2000). "Our sense of Snow: John Snow in medical geography". Soc Sci Med. 50 (7–8): 923–35. PMID 10714917.
- ↑ WHO Cholera [1]
- ↑ King AA, Ionides EL, J.Luckhurst, Bouma MJ (2008). "Inapparent infections and cholera dynamics". Nature. 454 (7206): 877–80. doi:10.1038/nature07084. PMID 18704085. Unknown parameter
|month=ignored (help) - ↑ McElroy, Ann and Patricia K. Townsend. Medical Anthropology in Ecological Perspective. Boulder, CO: Westview, 2009, 375.