Cholera

Causes

Cholera is transmitted in areas without clean drinking water.  Human feces gets into the water supply due to the lack of proper treatment of human waste.  The bacteria lives in rivers that are semi-salty, or brackish, and along the coast of the ocean.  Cholera can also be contracted from eating raw shellfish, as cases have occurred in the Gulf of Mexico region of North America.  The disease is not spread from casual contact with an infected person.

Symptoms

This disease progresses rapidly from incubation to infection, from several hours to five days, but typically symptoms appear between day two and day five.  Symptoms of this disease include watery diarrhea with mucus (also known as rice water diarrhea), fishy-smelling feces, vomiting, leg and stomach cramps, dehydration and children can get fevers.

Medical Treatment

Cholera is treated with drinking water.  It is necessary to replace the fluids lost and to prevent dehydration.  Pharmacists have rehydration solutions that replace the fluid, salt and other minerals lost in the diarrhea.  Severe dehydration requires hospitalization so that fluids can be delivered directly into the bloodstream.  Antibiotics will kill the bacterial infection and discontinue the fluid loss.  Common medicines are tetracycline and erythromycin. 

Prevention

Cholera occurs in areas where proper drinking water is unavailable.  Therefore, bottled water is recommended in these environments.  If bottled water is unavailable, boil tap water and make sure all foods are fresh, fully cooked and hot.  Avoid undercooked shellfish or raw seafood, salads and fruits without peels, as they may have been washed in contaminated water and wash your hands after using the toilet and before handling food or drinking water.

Life Cycle

The life cycle begins when an infected human expels the rice-water like diarrhea into a place near the water supply.  The next, uninfected person consumes contaminated food or water, and the organism passes into the stomach where most are killed.  Those that survive flow into the small intestine, and grow tiny whips called flagellum.  They fight through the protective mucus that lines the intestinal wall and take up residence on the wall itself.  They lose their flagellum and begin to reproduce.  The process of reproduction creates toxic proteins which causes the diarrhea, which carries the next generation out to infect more hosts.  This organism, like other single-celled organisms, reproduces asexually, dividing in half to produce an exact copy of itself without the need for a partner.

 REFERENCES

Medicine.net – Cholera

http://www.medicinenet.com/cholera/page2.htm

Cholera – Symptoms, diagnosis, treatment and vaccine

http://hcd2.bupa.co.uk/fact_sheets/html/cholera.html

 2009 WHO Statisitcs

http://www.who.int/whosis/whostat/EN_WHS09_Full.pdf

 Wikipedia – Cholera

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cholera

 WHO | Treatment of cholera

http://www.who.int/topics/cholera/treatment/en/index.html