Cholera is another disease that effects lower income areas, or people living with no access to clean water. One of the major influences in allowing it to spread was the lack of public sanitation and the lack of understanding. Renowned physicians of the time, Max von Pettenkofer, thought that it was spread through the air as a miasma. These physicians thought that the way to fight it was prevention and not a cure. The disease typically struck the poor people because they were the ones drinking the public water so thats where the disease showed up. John Snow was the man who truly made the difference when he isolated the Broad Street water pump as the source of disease in London. Cholera is so easily able to cause pandemics because it is so easily transmissible from source to source and as everyone needs water once the source gets infected it can infect multiple people before anyone realizes what is going on.
Louis Pasteur proved beyond a shadow of the doubt that vital force didn’t exist when he conducted his swan-neck flask experiment and the microbes didn’t infect the flask even though air could run into the broth. Pacini and Koch were the ones to isolate cholera, Pacini did it before Koch but didn’t get the recognition that Koch did. When Snow isolated the Broad Street pump and the began cutting off the public water they began to understand more about the transmission of it and that it ran through the water system. People began cleaning the privvies up and stopped dumping fecal matter into the streets and it started to slow the spread of cholera.
Haiti never had cholera until 2010 when the UN peacekeepers from Nepal brought it in with them. Their feces leaked into the longest river in Haiti and got 739,000 people sick and 8,900 deaths were attributed to this contamination. There was also an outbreak in 2001 in South Africa and thousands got infected and 63 died. A lot of these outbreaks are caused by increase globalization and the ease with which people can get around.