Although the disease has been clearly documented throughout history, Cholera’s geographic and temporal origins are rather ambiguous. By the 16th Century, the disease was documented in India, but it is possible that the disease had occurred early in history as far back as the ancient Greeks. The first Cholera pandemic occurred in Calcutta in the year 1816, spreading along trade routes from the city to places in Asia and Africa. The second pandemic outbreak occurred in Russia in 1829, stemming from the spread of the first pandemic, and the Russian pandemic spread to Europe, then to the United States through the immigration of the Irish from the potato famine. The third Cholera pandemic, which began in 1852 and is widely considered to be the most deadly, had spread across the world by this point. It was during this epidemic where John Snow noted that the disease was caused by water contamination due to the dense urbanization stemming from the Industrial Revolution. Henry Whitehead, working in conjunction with John Snow, spread the news of Snow’s development and affected a change in waste water treatment and urban sanitation. Essentially, together these two men founded the modern science of epidemiology.
However, neither of them knew the root cause of the disease. It was Filippo Pacini who identified the Cholera bacterium during the third pandemic in Florence in 1854. Years after Pacini’s discovery, Robert Koch also confirmed the bacterium theory of Cholera in 1883, and his mainstream exposure caused the scientific community to credit him with the discovery. Along with Snow and Whitehead, Pacini and Koch contributed to the discrediting of the miasma theory of disease outbreaks. The fourth and fifth pandemics, far less severe than the previous three, allowed Koch to nurture his eventual development of confirmed germ theory. The sixth pandemic spread again all across the world, and had a very high mortality rate in India, the Arab countries, and Northern Africa. After the sixth pandemic, widespread pandemic Cholera disappeared from the world, with only endemic cases popping up in poorer nations across the world. Until the seventh pandemic, Cholera remained isolated to these poor areas, and the seventh pandemic outbreak ravaged these poor countries due to the poor water treatment methods in these countries. Since these outbreaks, the world has been greatly affected by Cholera. Now with modern techniques of water treatment, Cholera has all but disappeared in much of the developed world. However, it still persists in poorer nations, where only education on the disease and rudimentary methods of sanitation have stemmed the onslaught of the disease.