History of cholera
Epidemics occurred after wars, civil unrest, or natural disasters, when water and food supplies had become contaminated with Vibrio cholerae, and also due to crowded living conditions and poor sanitation.
The disease dispersed from India to Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and Eastern Africa through trade routes.
[6] The second pandemic lasted from 1826 to 1837 and particularly affected North America and Europe, due to the result of advancements in transportation and global trade, and increased human migration, including soldiers.
[7] The third pandemic erupted in 1846, persisted until 1860, extended to North Africa, and reached South America, for the first time specifically affecting Brazil.
Egypt, the Arabian peninsula, Persia, India, and the Philippines were hit hardest during these epidemics, while other areas, such as Germany in 1892 and Naples from 1910 to 1911, also suffered severe outbreaks.
The seventh pandemic originated in 1961 in Indonesia and is marked by the emergence of a new strain, nicknamed El Tor, which still persists (as of 2019[8]) in developing countries.
[11] The cholera outbreak extended as far as China, Indonesia (where more than 100,000 people succumbed on the island of Java alone) and the Caspian Sea in Europe, before receding.
In London, the disease claimed 6,536 victims and came to be known as "King Cholera"; in Paris, 20,000 died (of a population of 650,000), and total deaths in France amounted to 100,000.
[24][25] In response to the second cholera pandemic, the Ottoman Empire and Egypt reformed their quarantine systems, following the western Mediterranean model.
The United States believed that cholera was brought by recent immigrants, specifically the Irish, and epidemiologists understand they were carrying disease from British ports.
Some United States scientists began to believe that cholera was somehow associated with African Americans, as the disease was prevalent in the South in areas of black populations.
Current researchers note their populations were underserved in terms of sanitation infrastructure and health care, and they lived near the waterways by which travelers and ships carried the disease.
A man named Ulanga made it his responsibility to collect and carry the dead to the provisional Cementerio de los Coléricos.
[46] The fourth cholera pandemic of the century began in the Ganges Delta of the Bengal region and traveled with Muslim pilgrims to Mecca.
[49] The epidemic of cholera that spread with the Austro-Prussian War (1866) is estimated to have taken 165,000 lives in the Austrian Empire, including 30,000 each in Hungary and Belgium and 20,000 in the Netherlands.
Farr made use of prior work by John Snow and others pointing to contaminated drinking water as the likely cause of cholera in an 1854 outbreak.
After quarantine measures were introduced in Astrakhan, rumors spread among the population that living people were being put in coffins, sprinkled with lime, and buried in cholera hospitals.
A 1905 governmental report mentioned he reappearance of asiatic cholera, characterized that as noteworthy, and described a "very strict marine quarantine" and other measures being imposed in the archipelago to control it.
[60] The last outbreak of cholera in the United States was in 1910–1911, when the steamship Moltke brought infected people from Naples to New York City.
In Italy, some blamed Jews and Romani, while in British India numerous Anglo-Indians ascribed the spread of cholera to Hindu pilgrims, and in the United States many accused Filipino immigrants of introducing the disease.
[67] As of March 2022, the World Health Organization (WHO) continues to define this outbreak as a current pandemic, noting that cholera has become endemic in many countries.
[1] The seventh cholera pandemic began in Indonesia, called El Tor[68] after the strain, and reached East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in 1963, India in 1964, and the Soviet Union in 1966.
[citation needed] Vibrio cholerae has shown to be a very potent pathogenic bacterium causing many pandemics and epidemics over the past three centuries.
[70] This process is strongly dependent on successful recognition of the bacteria by lytic phages, in which cell surface receptors play a crucial role.
In the case of V. cholerae, the changed receptor gene expression is due to an alteration in cell-density during its infection cycle, a process called quorum sensing (QS).
The stool samples collected from patients contain clumps of bacterial cells, demonstrating the occurrence of cell-cell interaction in the latter stage of the infection cycle.
[citation needed] A previous study has unravelled the mode of action of auto-inducers on preventing predation on the level of phage entry.
[72] The study has shown that the aforementioned auto-inducers downregulate the ten biosynthetic genes of the surface O-antigen, which is primarily used as a phage receptor for Vibriophages.
[citation needed] A persistent urban myth states 90,000 people died in Chicago of cholera and typhoid fever in 1885, but this story has no factual basis.
[129] In 1885, a torrential rainstorm flushed the Chicago River and its attendant pollutants into Lake Michigan far enough that the city's water supply was contaminated.
