Word: cholerae
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Economic-development and family-planning programs have helped slow the tide of people, but in some places, population growth is moderating for all the wrong reasons. In the poorest parts of the world, most notably Africa, infectious diseases such as AIDS, malaria, cholera and tuberculosis are having a Malthusian effect. Rural-land degradation is pushing people into cities, where crowded, polluted living conditions create the perfect breeding grounds for sickness. Worldwide, at least 68 million are expected to die of AIDS by 2020, including 55 million in sub-Saharan Africa. While any factor that eases population pressures may help...
...Sakhalin, still reeling from excessive exercise of the liver, I boarded the Eins Soya ferry at Korsakov for the five-and-a-half-hour trip across the Sea of Okhotsk to Wakkanai, Japan. Chekhov, too, intended to take a boat to Japan from Sakhalin, but a raging cholera outbreak on the Japanese side caused the good doctor to cancel his trip. I soon passed out in a deck chair for the duration of the ferry ride?but not before musing that, one day, return journeys to Sakhalin might even be fashionable...
...floods, however, are nothing short of a tragedy and have rapidly become a symbol of the government's incompetence and corruption. The numbers are staggering: 142 dead (57 in Jakarta), 385,000 displaced, damage estimated at more than $200 million, 80,000 people suffering from diarrhea, influenza and cholera, and only 265 doctors made available at government health posts. "The only help we've received from the government is when they loaned us four rubber boats to transport our things," says Andi Sayuti, head of the neighborhood rescue effort. "And even those were taken back after...
...dawn of the 20th century, the roster of illnesses that spelled almost inevitable death seemed to stretch forever. Cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, cirrhosis, pneumonia, cholera, diphtheria, tuberculosis and even the flu were relentless killers. Some victims might hang on to eke out a normal life span, albeit in disability and pain; some might even recover entirely. But survival was purely a crapshoot, with depressingly unfavorable odds. The hospital was a place where people went to die, not to be cured...
This was no contemporary war game, however. It was New York City in 1832, when the town was struck by a devastating cholera epidemic. That the city fought back as hard and effectively as it did was a tribute to a health system honed by floods of immigrants and the diseases they carried. New York's response to its great plagues, in fact, became a model for the rest of the country. In the decades to follow, the city's lessons were to be institutionalized in the creation of new federal health agencies, new public hospitals...