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The sixth cholera pandemic (1899–1923) was a major outbreak of cholera beginning in India, where it killed more than 800,000 people, and spreading to the Middle East, North Africa, Eastern Europe, and Russia.
- Overview
- Cholera through history
- The first six pandemics
- The rise of the seventh pandemic
The recorded history of cholera is relatively short and remarkable. Although the ancient Greek physicians Hippocrates (5th–4th century bce) and Galen (2nd–3rd century ce) referred to an illness that may well have been cholera, and there are numerous hints that a cholera-like malady has been well known in the fertile delta plains of the Ganges River...
The recorded history of cholera is relatively short and remarkable. Although the ancient Greek physicians Hippocrates (5th–4th century bce) and Galen (2nd–3rd century ce) referred to an illness that may well have been cholera, and there are numerous hints that a cholera-like malady has been well known in the fertile delta plains of the Ganges River...
Cholera became a disease of global importance in 1817. In that year a particularly lethal outbreak occurred in Jessore, India, midway between Calcutta (Kolkata) and Dhaka (now in Bangladesh), and then spread throughout most of India, Burma (Myanmar), and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). By 1820 epidemics had been reported in Siam (Thailand), in Indonesia (where more than 100,000 people succumbed on the island of Java alone), and as far away as the Philippines. At Basra, Iraq, as many as 18,000 people died during a three-week period in 1821. The pandemic spread through Turkey and reached the threshold of Europe. The disease also spread along trade routes from Arabia to the eastern African and Mediterranean coasts. Over the next few years, cholera disappeared from most of the world except for its “home base” around the Bay of Bengal.
The second cholera pandemic, which was the first to reach into Europe and the Americas, began in 1829. The disease arrived in Moscow and St. Petersburg in 1830, continuing into Finland and Poland. Carried by tradesmen along shipping routes, it rapidly spread to the port of Hamburg in northern Germany and made its first appearance in England, in Sunderland, in 1831. In 1832 it arrived in the Western Hemisphere; in June more than 1,000 deaths were documented in Quebec. From Canada the disease moved quickly to the United States, disrupting life in most of the large cities along the eastern seaboard and striking hardest in New Orleans, Louisiana, where 5,000 residents died. In 1833 the pandemic reached Mexico and Cuba.
The third pandemic is generally considered to have been the most deadly. It is thought to have erupted in 1852 in India; from there it spread rapidly through Persia (Iran) to Europe, the United States, and then the rest of the world. Africa was severely affected, with the disease spreading from its eastern coast into Ethiopia and Uganda. Perhaps the worst single year of cholera was 1854; 23,000 died in Great Britain alone.
The fourth and fifth cholera pandemics (beginning in 1863 and 1881, respectively) are generally considered to have been less severe than the previous ones. However, in some areas extraordinarily lethal outbreaks were documented: more than 5,000 inhabitants of Naples died in 1884, 60,000 in the provinces of Valencia and Murcia in Spain in 1885, and perhaps as many as 200,000 in Russia in 1893–94. In Hamburg, repeatedly one of the cities in Europe most severely affected by cholera, almost 1.5 percent of the population perished during the cholera outbreak of 1892. The last quarter of the 19th century saw widespread infection in China and particularly in Japan, where more than 150,000 cases and 90,000 deaths were recorded between 1877 and 1879. The disease spread throughout South America in the early 1890s.
Cholera did not spread widely again until 1961, the beginning of the seventh pandemic. Unlike earlier pandemics, which began in the general area of the delta region of the Ganges River, this pandemic began on the island of Celebes in Indonesia. The seventh pandemic spread throughout Asia during the 1960s. During the next decade it spread westward to the Middle East and reached Africa, where cholera had not appeared for 70 years. The African continent is believed to have been struck harder at this time than ever before and in 1990 was the origin of more than 90 percent of all cholera cases reported to the World Health Organization (WHO). In 1991, 19 African nations reported nearly 140,000 cases in total. A particularly large outbreak occurred in 1994 among the many hundreds of thousands who fled widespread killing in Rwanda and occupied refugee camps near the city of Goma, Zaire (now Democratic Republic of the Congo). Tens of thousands perished from cholera during the first four weeks following their flight.
In 1991 cholera appeared unexpectedly and without explanation in Peru, on the western coast of South America, where it had been absent for 100 years. Cholera caused 3,000 deaths in Peru the first year, and it soon infected Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, and Chile and leaped northward to Central America and Mexico. By 2005 cholera had been reported in nearly 120 countries. Although the seventh pandemic continued in many parts of the world, the more-industrialized countries of the world were largely spared. As the disparity between industrialized and less-developed countries grew, cholera, which previously had been a global disease, seemed to have become yet another burden to be borne by impoverished nations of the Third World. Moreover, experts predicted that this time cholera would not go away but would become endemic to many parts of the world, much as it has been for centuries to the Ganges delta.
Sep 12, 2017 · The sixth cholera pandemic (1899–1923) largely didn’t affect western Europe and North America due to advances in public health and sanitation. But the disease still ravaged India, Russia, the...
Nov 18, 2016 · At the time, the sixth cholera pandemic was in full swing in the Middle East, Europe, and North Africa. Reeves says that a phage—a virus that infects bacteria—picked up the "classic" form of the cholera toxin gene from the sixth strain and then infected the El Tor strain, transferring the toxin gene.
Seven cholera pandemics have occurred in the past 200 years, with the first pandemic originating in India in 1817. The seventh cholera pandemic is officially a current pandemic and has been ongoing since 1961, according to a World Health Organization factsheet in March 2022. [1]
May 9, 2008 · At the turn of the century, the sixth pandemic killed more than 800,000 in India before moving into the Middle East, northern Africa, Russia and parts of Europe. By 1923, cholera had receded...
Nov 30, 2022 · 16 December 2022. العربية. 中文. Français. Русский. Español. Description of the Situation. GLOBAL OVERVIEW. Current Situation. Since 2021, there has been an increase in cholera cases and their geographical distribution globally. In 2021, 23 countries reported cholera outbreaks, mainly in the WHO Regions of Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean.
