Comparing Cholera With Vibrio Cholera Pandemics

Have you heard of cholera? It’s the intestinal infection that results in the loss of large volumes of watery stool, leading to severe and rapidly progressing dehydration and shock. () This dehydration can eventually lead to death, if not taken care of in a timely manner. Cholera is caused by infection with Vibrio cholerae. It is regularly appearing in 50 countries, and it has caused a multitude of epidemics. Since 1817, seven cholera pandemics have spread from Asia to all over the world. (Harris, LaRocque, Qadri, Ryan, & Calderwood, 2012) The seventh one began in 1961 and kills 120,000 a year. That seems like a large number of deaths, but compared to the three to five million affected per year, it is only a small fraction of people. That

Forty-one cases were reported. This was only a 4.3% attack rate, but thirteen of these cases were hospitalized. A matched case-control study was conducted to identify the possible exposure variables. Since all wells were heavily chlorinated immediately after the outbreak, water samples were not tested. The cases were managed symptomatically. Descriptive epidemiology suggested clustering of cases around one public well. Vibrio cholerae El Tor O1, serotype Ogawa was isolated from four of six rectal swabs. The water from the public well was associated with the outbreak. On the basis of these conclusions, access to the well was barred immediately, and it was protected. This investigation highlighted the broader use of field epidemiology methods to implement public-health actions guided by epidemiologic data to control a cholera epidemic ( Das, A., Manickam, P., Hutin, Y., Pal, B., Chhotray, G., Kar, S., & Gupte, M,

In one case an outbreak in India happened, out of 8,367 patients 921 contracted Cholera. In this case study, it was contracted more by women around the age of 30-50 years old. This is not saying that those are the ages of the women that are most likely to contract it, that just so happened to happen in this case (Fredrick, 2012). Many of the other patients did not die and were treated. Fifty percent of the patients had diarrhea and dehydration. The other 50% had diarrhea, vomiting, and also had a mixture of on and off fevers. So you could easily say the others had it worse. (Fredrick, 2012) This case study is very similar to the study of children who were five years of age or younger in Hubli-Dharwad, India. In this case the most common to die were the kids under two years old. Although these patients did not fully contract it, they did die because they were younger and weaker. They couldn't fight the infectious disease as well as the older kids could, so they were dying from the first symptoms. The older kids did however contract cholera and fought hard to not die from the disease.