The Looming 8th Pandemic – Climate Change and Cholera

[damnedifIknow]

Throughout history, only a few pathogens have made historical impacts on human health. One of these is cholera. Caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae this potentially fatal disease has caused more pandemic than influenza, plague and smallpox. The most recent, the seventh, occurred in the 1960s when many parts of Asia suffered for four agonizing years.

Today, cholera has been for the most part controlled and limited to only a few places such as Bangladesh and Haiti. These countries appear to have seasonal intervals of infection and are continuing to be monitored. Yet, since the early 1990s, the concern for another pandemic has been haunting public health officials. What makes their worry more pressing is the fact the oncoming onslaught may be due to a factor seemingly out of our control: climate change."

Changes in climate are not limited to levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide or recorded temperatures. Though these are the factors gaining the most headlines, other factors play a role in determining climactic shifts. One of the most important in terms of cholera is the interface between the atmosphere and the ecological niche of the oceans. Changes in ocean patterns can lead to dramatic shifts in weather such as the El Niño Southern Oscillation. Other changes also occur resulting in global variations of local climatic conditions. Inasmuch as the debate over what might be causing these shifts, the reality is they are occurring and can impact how and more importantly where pathogens live, thrive, and infect.

* With this evidence in hand, the potential for drawing a map of at-risk areas could be developed. Last week, an international team of researchers who undertook the task revealed their results. They developed a global map where cholera may be able to live currently as well as into the future. Based on the findings, there is every reason to believe we are on the verge of another pandemic and this time, even North America may see a return."

http://www.popsci.com/looming-8th-pandemic-climate-change-and-cholera

[starroute]

1. The New York cholera epidemic of 1832

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/15/science/15chol.html?pagewanted=print

On a Sunday in July 1832, a fearful and somber crowd of New Yorkers gathered in City Hall Park for more bad news. The epidemic of cholera, cause unknown and prognosis dire, had reached its peak.

People of means were escaping to the country. The New York Evening Post reported, “The roads, in all directions, were lined with well-filled stagecoaches, livery coaches, private vehicles and equestrians, all panic-struck, fleeing the city, as we may suppose the inhabitants of Pompeii fled when the red lava showered down upon their houses.” . . .

The epidemic left 3,515 dead out of a population of 250,000. (The equivalent death toll in today’s city of eight million would exceed 100,000.) . . .

The initial response to the epidemic, Kenneth T. Jackson, a professor of history at Columbia University, said recently, exposed more than ever the city’s divisions of class, race and religion. The disease hit hardest in the poorest neighborhoods, particularly the slum known as Five Points, where African-Americans and immigrant Irish Catholics were crowded in squalor and stench. “Other New Yorkers looked down on the victims,” said Dr. Jackson, editor of The Encyclopedia of New York City. “If you got cholera, it was your own fault.”