talking about epidemics

[bobbieinok]

this is from the end of a long article on the history of cholera

http://www.posen-l.com/Cholera.htm

....

The Epidemics

There were several large epidemics that swept through Europe and the Americas in the 1800s. It generally took several years for it to finish spreading and to die out. In some areas, it lasted half a year while in others there may have been three or more years of significant numbers of infections.

1817-1823 The first great cholera pandemic of the 19th century swept Asia, probably originating near Calcutta and spreading from there throughout southeast Asia, Japan and China. Although it spread as far as southern Russia and the middle east, an exceptionally cold winter in 1823-24 kept it from reaching western Europe.

1826-37 The second cholera pandemic of the 19th century, and the most devastating one, began in Bengal and spread through India in 1826. It reached Afghanistan in 1827, and spread further into central Asia and the middle east. By late 1830 it had reached Moscow, and from there spread westward through Poland into Europe in 1831. It reached England on a ship from Hamburg in October 1831 and spread throughout the British Isles. Americans watched nervously, invoking quarrantine restrictions. It reached New York in 1832, and spread from there throughout most of the U.S.

1849 The third major worldwide pandemic of cholera, again starting in Bengal, reached Europe and the U.S. in 1848-49. It flared up again in London in 1854. It was at this time, that the English physician John Snow made his discoveries.

1863-66 The fourth cholera pandemic of the 19th century began in India in 1863, spread first to the Middle East, and then into the Mediterranean. It arrived in New York on a ship coming from France in October 1865, and spread rapidly. Public health reform kept the death toll lower than in previous epidemics, but there were tens of thousands of deaths nonetheless. A residual wave swept through the south and midwest in 1873, hitting particularly hard in the Mississippi and Ohio valleys.

1881-1896 A fifth cholera pandemic was notable for the discovery of its cause, by the German physician Robert Koch. Like its predecessors, this epidemic began in India, and spread both east and west from there. By this time improvements in sanitation kept it from affecting many European cities, and improved diagnosis and quarantine measures kept it out of the U.S.

A sixth pandemic began in 1899, and continued to spread through Asia over the next ten years. The U.S. was not affected, nor were most western European cities.

Today, sanitary improvements have largely eliminated cholera from industrialized countries. Cholera remains endemic in many areas of the world, however. The seventh cholera pandemic that began in Indonesia in 1961 continues. After a Peruvian outbreak in 1991, Central and South America saw more than one million cases and eleven thousand deaths through 1995, and the disease also continues in parts of Africa and Asia.

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there's a bibliography and a list of web sites

[Village Idiot]

1. Many Amerikans do not realize HOW CLOSE

the 1991 cholera epidemic came to being an Amerikan epidemic...

In LOS ANGELES in 1991, dozens of cholera-infected people debarked from an Argentinian airliner that had previously picked up passengers in Lima, Peru...

This could have been INCREDIBLE NASTY. Many people do not know that the average time it takes to travel by air ANYWHERE is much less than the average incubation time for almost ANY nasty infectious disease...