Word: cholerae
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Natives of the northern mountains of India believe that cholera is a six-handed demon with no feet. Therefore it cannot leave its habitat in India's lowlands until some traveling hillsman comes along, upon whom it can lay its many clutches. Actually the cause of cholera is a microbe shaped like a comma, which enters the body only through the mouth, infests the digestive tract, irritates the bowels to such extent that they extract and eject quarts of fluid from the body. A victim of cholera may die-shriveled and cold from dehydration, uremia and toxemia-within four...
Primitive and scientific explanations aside, by last week 16,500 inhabitants of the northwestern mountains of India had died in a cholera epidemic. Frantic sanitarians had vaccinated 600,000 persons, doused thousands of wells with germicidal potassium permanganate to halt an epidemic which began the end of April. Nonetheless, the epidemic has spread northwesterly into Afghanistan...
This worries the sanitarians of the Western World. For from Northwestern India by way of Afghanistan spread the first epidemic of Asiatic cholera which Europe knew. It began in 1826, reached Russia in 1830, England in 1831. Another wave spread to Mecca, Egypt, England and, in 1832, to the U. S. Last of successive pandemics touched the U. S. as late as 1911, and the disease has been kept out of the country since only by close medical inspection of every sailor and traveler who enters a U. S. port...
Last week this problem became acute. From the interior of China came a cry from an agent of the League of Nations sent there last autumn when a Chinese plague of cholera threatened the world (TIME, Oct. 25). As cholera subsided, typhus rose, wrung from League Sanitarian Herman H. Mooser a warning: "The danger is imminent. Refugees throughout Central China are simply filthy with typhus-carrying lice. All the Chinese soldiers in the Lung-hai area (see p. 17) are lousy. There are no Chinese delousing stations, and we are half crazy trying to get co-operation from Chinese military...
Crime, disease and juvenile delinquency are shown spawning in the squalor of "old-law" tenements,* of which 67,000 still exist in Manhattan. The horror of a cholera epidemic which ravaged the slums in the last century is vividly projected. (Today's scourge: tuberculosis.) Two scenes show the panic when fire sweeps through the tenement's rickety hallways...