Cholera is an acute, infectious, often fatal disease caused by the micro organism Vibrio cholerae. It is endemic in India and some other tropical countries and occasionally spreading to temperate climates. The symptoms of cholera are diarrhoea and the loss of water and salts in the stool.
In its more ordinary form it commences with sickness, vomiting, or perhaps two or three loose evacuations of the bowels; after which follow a sense of burning at the praecordia, an increased purging and vomiting of a white or colourless fluid, great prostration of strength, spasms at the extremities, which increase in violence with the vomiting and purging. Such cases may last from twelve to thirty- six hours; after this the patient generally sinks into a state of extreme collapse, and this stage in most cases passes by a gradual transition into a febrile one, which in a majority of instances proves fatal. Sometimes the patient is suddenly stricken down and dies, collapsed within a few hours without diarrhoea or vomiting.
In severe cholera, the patient develops violent diarrhoea with characteristic 'rice-water stools,' vomiting, thirst, muscle cramps, and sometimes circulatory collapse. Death can occur as quickly as a few hours after the onset of symptoms. The mortality rate is more than 50 percent in untreated cases, but falls to less than 1 percent with proper treatment. Treatment consists mainly of intravenous or oral replacement of fluids and salts. Packets for dilution containing the correct mixture of sodium, potassium, chloride, bicarbonate, and glucose have been made widely available by the WHO. Most patients recover in three to six days. Antibiotics such as tetracyclines, ampicillin, chloramphenicol, and trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole can shorten the duration of the disease, but have their own long term risks in damage to the immune system.
Cholera first appeared (in recognised form) in Europe in 1829, and reached Britain in 1831, spreading thence to America. Western Europe was again visited by it in 1847, 1853, 1865, 1873, 1875, and in 1885. In 1892 Russia and Western Europe suffered severely.
By 1905 it was ascertained that the primary and essential element in the production of cholera was a constituent of the excreta of cholera patients. At the time it wasn't known what the agent was, but that it is an organism capable of propagating itself when it is taken into the alimentarycanal in food, impure water, or the like, was beyond a doubt. Dr. Koch asserted that the essential cause was a bacillus, having the form of a curved rod, hence then called the comma bacillus, and that the disease was caused by the multiplication of this organism in the small intestines.
A method of protective inoculation against cholera was tried in India, with some success around 1900. At the same time it was established that the contagion of cholera is not so likely to be conveyed by personal intercourse as by residence in an infected district. Sanitary measures proved to be the only efficacious means of arresting an epidemic; insanitary conditions decidedly favour it - quite obvious as the disease is spread through contact with infected faeces.
What is called British cholera is a bilious disease, long known in most countries, and is characterized by copious vomiting and purging, with violent griping, cramps of the muscles of the abdomen and lower extremities, and great depression of strength. It is most prevalent at the end of summer or the beginning of autumn. Cholera infantum (infants' cholera) is the name sometimes given to a severe and dangerous diarrhoea to which infants are liable in hot climates or in the hot season. Research Cholera
Abbreviations
Medicine
Research Cholera