Cholera is a disease that is mainly spread from the oral-fecal route. This means people tend to contract this when they come into contact with poop that has cholera in it. Although most of the ways of contracting it are gone there are still cases that come up from the same way they did in history. Cholera really develops in the Sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia. Historically it has happened anywhere there is a large body of water that people use as their main source of water and it has been infected with it. Cholera is a water/food-borne illness and it lives in water so it can be there for days and months. In history people mainly got it because the main drinking water port was infected with the disease because people would use the restroom and clean themselves in the water. It also didn’t even have to be directly in the water, cases could come up where people would contract it because their restrooms, which might have been way from the water, had runoffs that would affect it. Cholera really hits areas that are full of communities in poverty and poor environments. Societies and cultures weren’t that clean or aware of the importance of cleanliness and how it was really important to keeping you from getting sick.
After people found out about the disease what really lead to limiting its ability of spreading came from attaining the knowledge of good sanitation. Then people learned the importance of population density for a disease that had to deal with feces. Different people played different roles for helping us make it a possibility to fight it off. John Snow was one of the first guys and he learned that Cholera is from water contamination and that the water ways that people used were infected with the disease and that is why it was spreading as fast and as big as it was. Henry Whitehead, who was a priest and someone who eventually worked with Snow had some contributions to it. Together, Whitehead and Snow set the significant precedent for the new science of epidemiology. Filippo Pacini and Robert Koch both identified the cholera bacteria that were around and Koch named it Vibrio Cholerae. Pacini didn’t really get the credit till later in his career for it, while Koch was noticed quickly for his work. After these guys played a big role fixing and improving the sanitation. The implication of public health systems helped with stopping the bacteria of cholera. It showed the importance of having public health and the role it has with knowledge in the community and its organizations. Public policy can facilitate changes in health before there is a complete knowledge of causation. There is also the implications of toilets and restrooms that lead to the decrease in the spread of cholera because it separated all the waste and disease from the water and wells and also made it an area where you can clean yourself as well.
For the factors that lead to the continuing epidemics in the 21st century it seems to be that when in poor areas and there are places where waste and disease can get into the only water source they have because they do not separate it and do not have the privileges of having more than one water source. For places like Yemen where they have damaged infrastructure and are deep in poverty because of things like war that destroy their areas it makes it so countries can have their water contaminated. Same thing with Bangladesh they are in more poverty so their waterlines are more likely to get hit.
Finally with outbreaks of Cholera in Haiti we saw it as human activity in the Artibonita River caused Cholera to spread to their whole country and fast. There were 473,649 cases and 6,631 deaths because of it. Although it has been made clear on ways to prevent it we need to make sure to help those countries that are in poverty with whatever they are doing because it is easy to spread Cholera.