Cholera

            Cholera is caused by a comma-shaped bacterium, vibrio cholerae, which is ingested in contaminated water and food. The bacteria multiply enormously in the intestine, where epithelial cells allow fluid to leak into the intestine with intense diarrhea as a result. The word cholera comes from the Greek words meaning bile and flow and the disease has a 50 to 70% mortality rate during the 1800's. Today we now know that cholera can be simply and successfully treated by immediate replacement of the fluid and salts lost through diarrhea. Infected people can be treated with an oral re-hydration solution of sugar and salts mixed with water and drunk in large amounts. Today this same solution is used throughout the world to treat diarrhea. During an epidemic, 80-90% of diarrhea patients can be treated by oral re-hydration alone, but those who become severely dehydrated must be given intravenous fluids. .
             The conventional wisdom was that cholera was spread from person to person, primarily from people arriving in port cities on ships. In the 1800s, doctors didn't really know what caused it or how to cure it. It became a controversial health issue because many people felt it divided the have's from the have"nots, since cholera mainly infected the poor. In Britain citizens thought it was a way for medical professionals to take bodies for anatomical dissection. It was only in the mid-1800s that the world's first epidemiological study, conducted by British physician John Snow, discovered that many victims had been drinking from the same well. It proved the connection to contaminated water supplies. .
             The search for a cure was intense because the disease was terrifying. The first cholera outbreaks had been killing thousands and leaving untold others sick. V. cholerae, which hit the Western Hemisphere in the 1830s, disrupts the transport of sodium and potassium in cells, causing diarrhea so severe that a person can lose more than 50 percent of his or her body weight, and death can occur in a matter of hours.