Researchers have uncovered two new cholera substrains in a displaced refugee population in southern Bangladesh, where a pre-emptive mass vaccination campaign of over one million refugees was successful in preventing an epidemic. ...
Jul 18, 2023
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A new study reveals why a highly infectious variant of the cholera bug, which caused large disease outbreaks in the early 1990s, did not cause the eighth cholera pandemic as feared—but instead unexpectedly disappeared.
Jul 5, 2022
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Cholera is still an enormous public health problem. There have been seven major pandemics of the acute diarrheal disease in the last 200 years. According to the WHO, cholera still kills up to 143,000 people each year and ...
Oct 8, 2021
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Findings from a team led by investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), reported in the online journal mBio, may help scientists develop a more effective vaccine for cholera, a bacterial disease that causes severe ...
Nov 17, 2020
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The evolution of epidemic and endemic strains of the cholera-causing bacterium Vibrio cholerae in Argentina has been mapped in detail by researchers at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical ...
Oct 1, 2020
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Three cholera epidemics struck 19th-century Leiden. Today's coronavirus pandemic prompted Martijn Storms, curator of maps and atlases at the Leiden University Libraries, to scour the library for maps about these past epidemics.
Sep 10, 2020
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The most likely source of the cholera epidemic in Yemen has been discovered by scientists. Through the use of genomic sequencing, scientists at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and Institut Pasteur estimate the strain of cholera ...
Jan 2, 2019
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The enormous adaptability of the cholera bacterium explains why it is able to claim so many victims. Professor Ariane Briegel from the Leiden Institute of Biology has now discovered that this adaptability is due to rapid ...
Dec 18, 2018
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For the first time, the transmission of cholera has been tracked at the household level across Dhaka, Bangladesh, a city with a 'hyper-endemic' level of the disease. Researchers from the Wellcome Sanger Institute and their ...
Jun 25, 2018
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A tricked-out cholera vaccine starts protecting against the deadly disease within a day, experiments in rabbits suggest. The rapid protection offered by this designer vaccine may one day limit the spread of cholera outbreaks, ...
Jun 13, 2018
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Cholera, sometimes known as Asiatic or epidemic cholera, is an infectious gastroenteritis caused by enterotoxin-producing strains of the bacterium Vibrio cholerae. Transmission to humans occurs through eating food or drinking water contaminated with Vibrio cholerae from other cholera patients. The major reservoir for cholera was long assumed to be humans themselves, but considerable evidence exists that aquatic environments can serve as reservoirs of the bacteria.
Vibrio cholerae is a Gram-negative bacterium that produces cholera toxin, an enterotoxin, whose action on the mucosal epithelium lining of the small intestine is responsible for the disease's most salient characteristic, exhaustive diarrhea. In its most severe forms, cholera is one of the most rapidly fatal illnesses known, and a healthy person's blood pressure may drop to hypotensive levels within an hour of the onset of symptoms; infected patients may die within three hours if medical treatment is not provided. In a common scenario, the disease progresses from the first liquid stool to shock in 4 to 12 hours, with death following in 18 hours to several days, unless oral rehydration therapy is provided.
The majority of reported cholera cases worldwide occur in Africa. It is estimated that most cases of cholera are unreported due to poor surveillance systems, particularly in Africa. Fatality rates are 5% of total cases in Africa, and less than 1% elsewhere. For a map of recent international outbreaks, see:[3]
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
