Word: cholerae
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Your informative account of the current cholera epidemic-not yet, mercifully, a "pandemic" [Aug. 31]-would have been still more informative if you had not been so nasty-nice-Nellie in talking about "waste-contaminated water supplies." I know you can't use the usual four-letter word-though what's wrong with "dung"? But the fact is that cholera bacilli multiply only in human (not animal) intestines. To carry cholera, water supplies must be contaminated by human fecal matter, or, if you prefer another bowdlerism, human excrement. If man would stop drinking and washing in the water...
Soviet Seamen. Europe and Africa were bracing last week for the arrival from Asia Minor of Vibrio cholerae, a comma-shaped bacillus that is the cause of the first serious outbreak of cholera in several years. So far, more than 3,000 cases, including at least 100 resulting in death, have been reported in a dozen countries along an arc that stretches from Dubai on the Persian Gulf to Accra on the west coast of Africa...
...epidemic is the latest flare-up of a hardy strain of cholera known as El Tor (named for the Egyptian quarantine station where it was first identified). The strain originated more than 30 years ago in the highlands of Indonesia's Celebes Islands. In recent years the disease has spread north to the Korean peninsula and west along the Southeast Asian mainland. After passing through India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, it became a raging epidemic in Iran and Iraq by 1965. There the disease seemed to mark time-at least until a month or so ago, when it resumed...
...ports may have carried El Tor to the Soviet Black Sea ports of Odessa and Kerch, where 101 cases have been reported. More recently, the disease has cropped up in Jordan, Iraq and Syria. Israel has reported 33 cases, Lebanon 30 and Libya 28. A Togolese businessman died of cholera in Ghana last week, and medical authorities in Kenya have isolated a suspected cholera victim who arrived in Nairobi on a flight from Rome. El Tor is expected to show up in Western Europe any day now. The outbreak has not yet approached the Middle East epidemic...
Such attitudes will hardly help solve what could develop into a serious public health problem. Epidemiologists see little danger that cholera will spread into Western Europe or the U.S., where sanitation is good and ample medical care available. But they are concerned that the disease may spread southward into Africa or westward into South and Central America. Their concern may well be justified. The government of Guinea last week reported that an unidentified intestinal illness has hospitalized 230 people in the country's capital of Conakry. The disease, which sounds suspiciously like cholera, has already killed 27 others...