Cholera Outbreak Quotes

You ever work with a UN stabilization force?” Ash asked. Harvath shook his head. “Then trust me. As the old saying goes, you can’t spell unprofessional, unethical, or unaccountable without the UN. The cholera outbreak the old blue helmets caused in Haiti? Over ten thousand dead, and it has spread to the Dominican Republic and Cuba. The rapes and sex crimes they have committed in Mali and everywhere else? The stories of their depravity and brutality are legion.

With all the enthusiasm of someone greeting a cholera outbreak, Dawes offered her hand and said, “Welcome to Lethe.

Then, as in 2020, the rich abandoned cities en masse: As the wealthy fled New York amid the cholera outbreak of 1832, one newspaper wrote, “The roads, in all directions, were lined with well-filled stage coaches . . . all panic struck, fleeing from the city.

Despite the prominence that "magic bullets" and "wonder drugs" hold in the layman's mind, most of the really decisive battles in the war against infectious disease consisted of measures to eliminate disease organisms from the environment. An example from history concerns the great outbreak of cholera in London more than one hundred years ago. A London physician, John Snow, mapped occurrence of cases and found they originated in one area, all of whose inhabitants drew their water from one pump located on Broad Street. In a swift and decisive practice of preventative medicine, Dr. Snow removed the handle from the pump. The epidemic was thereby brought under control - not by a magic pill that killed the (then unknown) organism of cholera, but by eliminating the organism from the environment.

The timing of Thomas Lewis’ illness suggests one chilling alternative history. The Broad Street outbreak had subsided in part because the only viable route between the well and the neighborhood’s small intestines had run through the cesspool at 40 Broad. When baby Lewis died, the connection had died with it. But when her husband fell ill, Sarah Lewis began emptying the buckets of soiled water in the cesspool all over again. If Snow had not persuaded the Board of Governors to remove the handle when he did, the disease might have torn through the neighborhood all over again, the well water restocked with a fresh supply of V. cholerae. And so Snow’s intervention did not just help bring the outbreak to a close. It also prevented a second attack.

You and I may not live to see the day,” Snow explained to the young curate, “and my name may be forgotten when it comes; but the time will arrive when great outbreaks of cholera will be things of the past; and it is the knowledge of the way in which the disease is propagated which will cause them to disappear.

No one had forgotten how in 1885 fouled water had ignited an outbreak of cholera and typhoid that killed ten percent of the city’s population.

An outbreak of vaccine-preventable measles that began in Disneyland over winter holidays in 2014 spread into seven states, exposing thousands to the contagion. Between 1996 and 2011, the United States experienced fifteen such outbreaks.17

And so it was with the Broad Street well that the decision to remove the pump handle turned out to be more significant than the short-term effects of that decision [Cholera outbreak abated.] . . . .But the pump handle stands for more than that local redemption. It marks a turning point in the battle between urban man and V. cholerae, because for the first time a public institution had made an informed intervention into a cholera outbreak based on a scientifically sound theory of the disease. . . . For the first time, the V. cholerae's growing dominion over the city would be challenged by reason, not superstition.

They had known each other for many years. Young Jacob had found his way onto a ship borne for the tropics, indentured to a pair of wealthy male planters, and he’d run away, ending up at the decaying ruins of La Briere, the plantation house of the de Malheurs. Lucien had been living there alone, the only survivor of a virulent outbreak of cholera, and the two young men, barely more than boys, had bonded together, determined to escape.

...if we are to keep alive the model of sustainable metropolitan life that Snow and Whitehead helped make possible 150 years ago, it is incumbent on us to do, at the very least, two things. The first is to embrace—as a matter of philosophy and public policy—the insights of science... The second is to commit ourselves anew to the kinds of public health systems that developed in the wake of the Broad Street outbreak, both in the developed world and the developing: clean water supplies, sanitary waste-removal and recycling systems, early vaccination programs, disease detection and mapping programs. Cholera demonstrated that the nineteenth-century world was more connected than ever before; that local public-health problems could quickly reverberate around the globe.

City officials may have destroyed evidence of the arrival of cholera-infected ships in the weeks before the outbreak, too. Following up on claims made by the port physician that the city had secretly quarantined passengers from a cholera-infected ship, investigators found that otherwise intact quarantine-hospital records for the months in question—April, May, and June 1832—had disappeared.50 * * * To be fair, the choices that nineteenth-century leaders had to make about whether or not to implement disease control strategies were not between two equally compelling options. The choices were between predictable costs and unpredictable benefits. They knew that quarantines and alerting the public about cholera would disrupt private interests, but they couldn’t be sure that either strategy would actually protect the public. It’s not surprising, then, that they opted for near-certain private benefits rather than mostly uncertain public ones. Plus they were under no obligation to do otherwise.

Established in 1796 at the edge of town in response to a cholera outbreak. We had more bodies than holes to put them in. Oh yes, people were puking and shitting themselves to death back then. Do you ever wish time travel were real? Well, don’t. Nobody but fucking idiots would go back in time.

London’s sewers, UK Built following the “Great Stink” of 1858 and deadly cholera outbreaks. Chief Engineer Bazalgette took 18 years, with 22,000 workers and 318 million bricks. The system is still in use.

The Great Stink (or How a Crisis Can Kickstart Radical Planning) Picture London in the 1850s. In fact, don’t picture it—smell it. Since medieval times, the city’s human waste had been deposited in cesspools—stinking holes in the ground full of rotting sludge, often in the basements of houses—or flushed directly into the River Thames. While thousands of cesspools had been removed since the 1830s, the Thames itself remained a giant cesspool that also happened to be the city’s main source of drinking water: Londoners were drinking their own raw sewage. The result was mass outbreaks of cholera, with over 14,000 people dying in 1848 and a further 10,000 in 1854.20 And yet city authorities did almost nothing to resolve this ongoing public health disaster. They were hampered not just by a lack of funds and the prevalent belief that cholera was spread through the air rather than through water, but also by the pressure of private water companies who insisted that the drinking water they pumped from the river was wonderfully pure. The crisis came to a head in the stiflingly hot summer of 1858. That year had already seen three cholera outbreaks, and now the lack of rainfall had exposed sewage deposits six feet deep on the sloping banks of the Thames. The putrid fumes spread throughout the city. But it wasn’t just the laboring poor who had to bear it: The smell also wafted straight from the river into the recently rebuilt Houses of Parliament and the new ventilation system conspired to pump the rank odor throughout the building. The smell was so vile that debates in the Commons and Lords had to be abandoned, and parliamentarians fled from the committee rooms with cloths over their faces. What became known as the “Great Stink” was finally enough to prompt the government to act.

In late August 1854, there was a severe cholera outbreak in London. The Broad Street area in Soho was the epicenter, with a hundred and twenty-seven dead in the first three days and more than five hundred dead by the second week of September.

2 Snow discovered that more than five hundred deaths from cholera had occurred within a ten-day period, and the victims were people who had consumed water from the pump. Furthermore, when he persuaded the authorities to remove the handle so that the pump was no longer usable, the Soho outbreak suddenly ceased.

The causal chain worked the other way around; that is, the outbreak of revolution, war, and social disorder created ideal conditions for cholera to survive. Cholera moved in the wake of revolution rather than triggering it.

For a paper delivered to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, he plotted sharp up-and-down graphs of case numbers, week by week or month by month, from the empirical records of several disease outbreaks—plague in London (1665), measles in Glasgow (1808), cholera in London (1832), scarlet fever in Halifax (1880), influenza in London (1891), and others—and then matched them with smooth rollercoaster curves derived from a certain mathematical equation.

The Ebola outbreak in Early March coincided with three separate vaccination campaigns countrywide: a cholera oral vaccine effort by Medicins Sans Frontieres under the WHO; and UNICEF-funded prevention programs against meningitis and polio.14

But the most enduring legacy is the threat of recurrence. Unlike classic cholera, the seventh pandemic has already lasted for more than half a century and, showing no signs of abatement, is capable of causing outbreaks wherever poverty, insecure water supplies, and unsanitary conditions persist. Indeed, in 2018 WHO reported that “every year there are roughly 1.3 to 4.0 million cases, and 21,000 to 143,000 deaths worldwide.

For a pathogen so adapted to nonhuman and even abiotic environments, the evolutionary pressure for a decline in virulence in human populations is no longer determinative. Future cholera outbreaks may therefore hold unpleasant surprises.

Columbus’s fateful voyage was inspired by his study of a map by Paolo Toscanelli. But there was also the 1854 cholera outbreak in London, which killed hundreds of people until a physician, John Snow, drew a map demonstrating that a single contaminated water pump was the source of the illness, thereby founding the science of epidemiology. There was the 1944 invasion at Normandy, which succeeded only because of the unheralded contribution of mapmakers who had stolen across the English Channel by night for months before D-Day and mapped the French beaches.* Even the moon landing was a product of mapping. In 1961, the United States Geological Survey founded a Branch of Astrogeology, which spent a decade painstakingly assembling moon maps to plan the Apollo missions. The Apollo 11 crew pored over pouches of those maps as their capsule approached the lunar surface, much as Columbus did during his voyage. It seems that the greatest achievements in human history have all been made possible by the science of cartography.