As of Tuesday, the Vibrio cholerae bacterium has reportedly left more than 1,415 people dead in Haiti and 60,240 treated for dehydration since the outbreak started in late October. The Head of the UN Mission for Stabilization in Haiti (MINUSTAH), Edmond Mulet, told the Associated Press that UN experts were trying to determine the source of the cholera epidemic ravaging the country and took seriously the hypothesis that UN peacekeepers may have inadvertently contributed to the outbreak of the disease.
The Pan American Health Organization now estimates that the number of cholera patients in Haiti may reach 400,000 in the next year with “up to half of those cases occurring in the next three months,” Dr. Jon Kim Andrus, deputy director of the organization, told reporters yesterday.
“For many of us here, this brings up memories of the cholera epidemic that began in Peru in 1991 and spread to more than 16 countries in the Americas within two years,” Andrus said. “Considering the intensity of travel and trade in the Americas, we know it’s difficult to prevent importations of isolated cases of cholera in other countries, but there are important steps that can be taken to prevent cholera from spreading and causing epidemics.”
In an interview with Discovery News, cholera expert Dr. Rita Colwell of the University of Maryland at College Park, and former director of the National Science Foundation, spoke about the endemic nature of cholera in the environment, how infections arise, and how to treat them. “The bacterium is a native inhabitant of the aquatic environment,” she says. “The bacterium is naturally occurring in aquatic environments — rivers, canals and especially in coastal waters.”
The bacterium attaches itself to the chitin shells on crabs, shrimps, and most notably the eurytemora copepod, a small zooplankton that is easy to filter out of drinking water using only a folded scarf or sari cloth.
“Richard Cash of Harvard 40 years ago showed that you need a million bacteria cells per teaspoon of water to come down with cholera. In water that has a lot of nutrients and is relatively warm, you can reach those numbers in sufficient quantity,” Colwell said.
