Word: cholerae
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...them. In 1970, a year before the birth trauma of the Bangladesh republic, a cyclone may have taken half a million lives. The number was only a guess: survivors, typically poor rice farmers and fishermen on exposed delta islands, can never afford to count the lost. Their suffering -- starvation, cholera, typhus -- is just beginning. Tagore identified April with Rudra, the Indian storm god, but Sea-Waves is really a meditation on "brute Madness." Wonders the poet: "Why in its midst was the mind of man placed...
Scientists do not know exactly why cholera periodically explodes into epidemics. The bacteria that cause it are part of the aquatic ecosystem, helping to break down dead shellfish. Cholera germs travel up the food chain by attaching themselves to plankton, which are eaten by fish and then by people. Studies by Rita Colwell, professor of microbiology at the University of Maryland, suggest that a plankton bloom, a rapid growth like the one reported off the coast of Peru earlier this year, may help trigger epidemics...
Even so, the epidemic may not be as devastating in other countries as it has been in Peru. "The country where cholera strikes first is always hit the hardest," claims Dr. Baldur Schubert, head of Brazil's National Commission for the Prevention of Cholera. "We've had time to prepare for the disease." The Brazilian government has distributed 450,000 illustrated pamphlets on the Amazon border to teach people how to combat cholera by boiling drinking water and washing one's hands after defecating. Authorities have also allocated $6 million to build public toilets in the area. In Colombia...
Even with the staunchest efforts, cholera's march through Latin America could mean trouble for years to come. Before the massive outbreak that spread from Asia in the 1960s, cholera was rarely seen on the African continent. Now, however, it reappears there every year and claims hundreds of lives. The only effective solution is good public sanitation. "We know that these diseases are basically problems of drinking water and sewage," says Health Minister Camilo Gonzalez Posso of Colombia. "Until we attack those fundamental needs, we will always be vulnerable to tropical diseases turned plague." But according to the WHO, providing...
HEALTH: A cholera epidemic sweeps across Latin America...